God Bless,
Kyle
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Big. Funny how such a small word could talk about something well… Big. But it does. It seems that I could say that Big is not truly a word that adequately describes something that is large. The word itself seems to be a parodox because it is actually quite small.

As I sit in my favorite place to blog (the back porch) I can look out and see the vastness of the clear sky over the glow of my laptop computer screen. My it looks beautiful tonight. Even though yet again I am being attacked by bugs it is totally worth it to sit and enjoy nature. It makes me think that beautiful is quite an inadequate word to describe the beauty that I get to have a front seat unimpeded view to. Just stopping to listen and look fills me with a childlike awe. Even as I took the trash to the road I was walking back just starting at the sky.

I started to think, hey, God made all this. Not just for any reason, but for us. Yep, he made this for little old us. I can’t even see all the stars but I know there are millions of them, each put in their place by God for us. That is how much he loves us, that he would create an entire stage of beauty for us to sit on the front row of the audience and just stare.

Recently the subject of God’s love has been on my mind. He loves you and I so much. But again, there isn’t any word to truly show how much God loves us which shows us how much he loves us. He wants us to live in his will and worship him, and in him we are complete (due to popular culture’s belief). He is the One who created everything just for us. Thats cool to think about, awesome actually. But I will never fully comprehend the love of God for me, not until I arrive face to face with him.

I don’t understand God, but I don’t think anyone does. I just know that just as there are mysteries in the Heavens, God is the same, but at the same time he is fully logical and understandable, just more than my 21 year old developed brain can comprehend. God is so big. I mean like REALLY REALLY BIG. I mean, check out the earth, its small compared to him and I think the earth is huge.

God is big and he is Love. And his love is never ending. Wow. Just sit in that for a few minutes. His love never ends. I feel like a child and I just want to sit and let my mouth hang open at that.

And the part I love to death is that even if we don’t love him, HE STILL LOVES US JUST AS BIG. Yep, you can shut him out, walk away from him, turn to another path, and he still loves you. It is his desire not to allow anyone to perish, he never turns his back on us. He can’t, we are all his kids. But just as some children chose a different path than their parents would chose, God has to allow us to make our own decision. Love is a choice, not an obligation. So we are allowed to wander, much to the sorrow of our creator, but he rejoices when we come back to him.

God’s love is never ending, no matter what. To the atheist, the Christian hater, the terrorist, the unwanted, the unknown, the lost, the confused, and anyone else, God loves you. That truly makes me smile, because its pure truth. God’s love is not given out of meeting a list of requirements or following a bunch of rules. God’s love is given because he loves us. Simple, yet our little human brain can’t understand it. And God’s love isn’t like earthly love, its pure.

Furthermore, God does not only love us, but he is love itself. He came up with the big idea of love from day one. He knows everything there is about love, pure love. He didn’t have to go to a class or figure it out, he is.

So we have to begin to know our creator if we are ever going to love big. We have to press into Him to love others. If you want to learn something you have to get to know about who created it. To be good in a subject, you have to study it and be around it. To learn how to love, you have to be in fellowship with Love, who is God. Even if you have never experianced love, you can learn how to love by loving God. Become lost in his vast ocean of love. Yeah, you might have to doggy paddle for a while, but soon you will learn to swim and then you will be able to love better.

So love. God loves us. He is big but that isn’t a good word to describe him. He is Love. He loves us, no matter what, all we have to do is love him back. Everything else falls into place.

Life is not about looking for shelter from the rain, its about standing out in the middle of the pouring down rain with our hands held skyward falling to our knees. Its about accepting that we are loved and we can’t understand, comprehend, nor reciprocate it. Learn how to worship, how to draw closer to God through following him, and love comes naturally.

Dive Deep,
Kyle

We want to take a few minutes to bring you up to speed on the future plans for our ministry. I wanted to start off with our mission statement:

We have 2 main goals of our ministry

1) Create a community of people on college campuses and within communities that are growing in their faith. We also wish to encourage them to share their faith with others.

2) Use technology to communicate the Gospel of Jesus Christ

The Vision:

For the next year (from now until next June) Dive Deep Ministries has 4 goals that we want to accomplish. These all fall under our mission statement and deal with the igniting of a different generation. With these goals we have also added a few new things that we will be doing over the year and they will be things that we can’t do on our own so we will need your help.

Our goals are:

Risk more than others think is safe, Care more than others think is wise, Dream more than others think is practical, Expect more than others think is possible.

So what are we already doing?

Last year we launched Prayer at the Falls on the TFC campus. After a revamp over the winter break, we changed the name to FLOOD. We also added on a staff member, Shawn Eberhard, dedicated to overseeing and assisting with the program. As with any new ministry program, we have adjusted this to be more community centered and are taking a non-traditional bible study approach for the next semester. We hope to expand the FLOOD program to another campus starting in the spring of 2011.

The Dive Deep website has been maintained and improved in a few different ways over the past few months. There is now a mobile version of the site that allows anyone with a web-capable phone to access the site and see what is going on. As we approach the next few weeks we are going to get back to our normal weekly blog as well.

So what are we doing going forward?

To add to the list of programs we will be starting a new initiative called Take the City. This will be composed of a team that wants to reach out to those around us and love on others as Christ loves us. If you are interested in more information, you can send us an e-mail at takethecity@divedeepministries.org or visit takethecity.divedeepministries.org. We plan on launching this program in the first quarter of 2011.

One of the biggest undertakings ahead of us will be our $5 Christmas program. No, we are not going to give out $5 to everyone for a Christmas bonus (although we admit that would be a great gesture, we just don’t have the financial means to do that at this point), but just the opposite. We are finalizing details, but we are going to ask that you, those of you who want to join us in this initiative, to spend only somewhere around $5 per person in your family for Christmas. Yep, this means if you only have 4 people in your family, you get somewhere around $5 to spend on them this Christmas. So what are you to do with the extra money? That’s another detail we are working out but it will involve giving it to someone else. You don’t have to write them a check or anything, but we are working on something that we can do together to impact our local communities during the Christmas season. You can read the story from where this comes from at 5dollar.divedeepministries.org.

We will also ask that you be praying for our ministry. God has some huge things in store for us and we want to honor Him in all that we do. Be praying for our ministry team as we grow the vision that God has given us. We ask that God would bless all of those who have been involved in our ministry in any way, from helping with a new project or being on our staff. We have created a way that you can become involved if you feel lead to be more involved in prayer through a prayer team. You can sign up and get put on the mailing list by going to prayer.divedeepministries.org.

On the subject of prayer, we have a pretty crazy idea. We want to be praying for you and we want for you to be able to e-mail prayers to us, but we also are going to give you the ability to text us your prayer request. Through technology we have acquired a phone number that allows us to receive and send text messages via the internet with no charge to our ministry (and only standard text messaging rates for you). One of our staff members will daily review the text that come in and forward on request to the prayer team. You don’t have to give us any personal information and it is our promise that we will not spam you with bogus text messages (We ask you do the same for us). You can text us (or even call and leave us a message with your prayer request – we check those too) at 404-923-0669. Standard text messaging rates do apply.

Wow, that’s a lot of stuff! You might be thinking that we are crazy or maybe you are as excited as we are about what God is going to do through us. The next 12 months seek to be a time that will push our faith to new bounds and look to God for his guidance. We can’t do this on our own, even with the help of our supporters, but that is the point. We are relying on God to lead us in these new adventures as we learn to risk more than others think is safe by stepping out on faith, care more than others think is wise by loving on those around us in some pretty cool ways, dreaming more than others think is practical by thinking of ways that are new and creative to reach the lost and the found, and finally expecting God to show up in a mighty way.

We are followers of Christ, the Son of God, who is our God always and forever. We are pursuing His will for our lives and for this ministry. I have a feeling that we will look back in a year after getting the opportunity to touch others lives and realize that our lives have been changed. We invite you to come along and share this experience with us. Apart we are all of different backgrounds and denominations but we all serve the same God. Together, we become a unified body of Christ that cannot be stopped.

Dive Deep,
Kyle Atkins
Executive Director
kyle@divedeepministries.org

P.S. – Give us a few days to get all the links working and pages made that we have talked about in this casting of vision. We are a tad short on the IT side of the house, so if you or anyone you know is interested in lending some volunteer time to help us with the website, just shoot me or Shawn (shawn@divedeepministries.org) an e-mail. Thanks!

If you look around at the world there are many Christians who seem to be living in this area of “dead faith”. They believe that Jesus is their Savior. The real issue is you wouldn’t be able to tell from looking at their lives that they are Christians. We as a culture are in a place where becoming practical atheists while professing to be Christians seems to be the normal way to do life. This is something we as the youth must start to change so we can get back to the original intent of what we are all about.

There are many stances on how we as Christians should live. If we really want to get down to the core of what we are about we are supposed to be different. Somewhere along our lineage we have implanted in our mind that Christians are supposed to stay contained to their Christian friends, their Christian church, their Christian t-shirts and sayings, but Jesus was never contained. We live in a society of cookie cutter Christians who all look the same as everyone else. While we should make every effort to live differently in this world most Christians look exactly the same as the rest of the world. We must stop living like this because it conveys the message that we really don’t care about God, so as Nietzsche suggested we live like “God is dead”.

When we look at the life of Jesus Christ who we know was sent as God incarnate to save us from our sins there was nothing ordinary about His life. He didn’t just go to the places everyone else went and he didn’t do the things that the typical “good Jewish person” would have done. This doesn’t mean that Jesus did anything wrong but that the culture had gotten it all wrong. The Pharisees had lead the people into a very legalistic culture and if we look at our present day culture there are not many differences. There is a problem with Christianity when we are the ones who are legislating our religion, persecuting minority groups, and living like non-believers when we should be living like Christ.

The great thing is we still have a chance to make changes that will positively effect our generation. We are stuck in a cycle we must get out from under. Superchick sums it up well in their song Hero when they say:

Now it’s our time to pick a side.
So don’t keep walking by not wanting to intervene,
Cause you just want to exist and never be seen.
So let’s wake up, change the world
Our time is now

It is time for a revolution of our generation that isn’t afraid to love those who others won’t love. It is our time to make a change instead of allowing it to continue on the current path. Instead of living in our Christian circle we need to break out. We need to flood the world with a love they have never seen before, something no one ever gives. We need to spend less time on legislating religion and more time on actually taking time to love the people around us.

Christ spent most of His time hanging out with those people who were living in sin. He was the ultimate example of what we should look like. Be willing to do life with those who are far from God and just be different. We were not called to be like everyone else, but to be the ones willing to stand for the oppressed, the persecuted, the underprivileged, and the ones who have no voice to offer. We should not sit in our houses with all of our stuff and look down on those who are not like us.

The things of this world will fade and at the end of our lives it will not matter what people here say about us. The only opinion that will matter is that of our Heavenly King. Begin to look internally and see how your life is doing. Are you living out an untamed faith that is fully on fire for God? On the flip side of that are you living like God may as well be dead because you say what you believe but never act it out? Take some time to see where you are and look for our upcoming blogs about how we can make a difference to show the world our God is alive. Let us be different for the cause of Christ!

Dive Deep,

KC

When you begin to really process that number, it can be a little bit overwhelming. That is a lot of people, and in the midst of that we can begin to feel like we are just one in a million. Numbers tend to dictate much of what we do. We have become about how many friends we have, how much money we have, how much stuff we own and the like. It seems in all of this we lose sight of the only number that matters. That number is 1.

Compared to the population of the world 1 seems very insignificant, but it actually holds more weight in reality. You can do many things with the number 1. It takes 1 person to begin to dream of new things and purse them, 1 person to lead a group of people to accomplish a goal, 1 person to create this amazing world we live in and 1 Savior to die for 1 person.

We tend to get stuck sometimes on the amount of people that are important to God. Sometimes we feel like God is happy when we share His message with just a few of them. It’s hard for us to grasp, but God cares about all of the people on this world on an individual level. Jesus Christ came to die for all 6,792,467,727 people.  We should never try to hold back what we believe and be willing to reach people.

If Jesus Christ came to die for each of us, then why should we keep that gift silent from the rest of the world? Jesus did not die for a everyone to allow us to not share the gift of eternal life with the people around us. We as Christians, true followers of Jesus, hold the responsibility of sharing the message of Christ with the world! We have been given a gift that is meant to be shared not to be held inside of us.

There are many ways to share this message with the world, some more effective than others. One thing is clear throughout the bible and that is Jesus’ message of love. When we are sharing this means that we should not be preaching something that goes against this. This includes messages that breed fear into new believers and make others want to come to Christ for fire insurance. Christ never took that approach and we really don’t know what it will be like. Instead of teaching about something we don’t understand, let us begin to teach of the love of God.

Christ has given us the gift of mercy and grace from our past sins. He has given us life, true life! So many people are living, but have yet to really live. One of the most effective ideas about sharing this gift comes from the magician Penn Jillette. After a show a man came up to him and started a conversation with him about his show. The man really showed interest in Penn’s acts and after a while handed him a Bible. He told the Penn that he was concerned about his eternal salvation. In the video that Penn posted about this conversation, he said:

““How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize?”

You can view the whole video by going to this youtube link. We would encourage you to take a few moments to watch this to grasp the whole idea that he is talking about.

Over the next few weeks we want to invite you to discover a new way to share your faith with others and some common pitfalls we all end up in. We can do much on our own with God, but we can reach so many more people when we unite for a common purpose.

This week we challenge you to search your heart and spend some time praying for those who you know do not know the Lord. Be sincere in your prayers and earnestly desire for their salvation. If you don’t know someone, then we suggest looking for people who you may know or have mutual friends with and begin to pray about them. Lets go change a nation!

Dive Deep,

KC

As we learn how to dive more into worship though prayer, acts of service, and spending time with our God, it would be good of us to talk about why we need to worship. God created us for a purpose, and this week Philip Roland, one of our staff members, was gracious enough to write out some thoughts and ideas on this subject.

You came and bled and died
Gave all you had in life
All for love, all for love
Your life destroyed the grave
Brought grace to those in need
All for love, all for love

Christ died for love. All that Jesus did, he did for love, because everything he did was done according to the will of God (”For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me” -John 6:38). God is love personified–-the very definition of love (“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” -1 John 4:16). Everything he does is loving and everything about him is loving, from his grace to his mercy to, yes, even his anger (for his anger at us when we sin is derived from his desire for holiness and the knowledge that we suffer when we separate ourselves from him with our sin), and this is because it is his nature to love. As a result, when we say that Jesus died for love, it is not simply a statement of Christ’s love for us, but an affirmation of God’s character and his status as the source of all true love.

Because of this, the fact that Christ died for us while also dying to serve the Father’s will is not contradictory as some people believe (and my affinity for John Piper is about to be made pretty evident here with what I’m about to say). He died first and foremost for the glory of God, and we do benefit from this–obviously we are to gain directly from Christ’s death and resurrection giving us the opportunity to have our sins forgiven and our lives begin anew. In addition to this, however, at a deeper level we are also fulfilled because the Father was glorified through Christ’s sacrifice, and when God is glorified, our ultimate purpose (to glorify God) is fulfilled–-our lives are enriched as a result. The world is only at the right place when God is in his correct position as supreme over all creation. We ourselves are only truly fulfilled when God is glorified, for we were created for God’s glory. When we use our lives to bring glory to God, it naturally draws us closer to him and further fills our lives with his presence, and certainly, what does having an abundant life (John 10:10b) mean if not to have a life filled with God’s presence and Spirit?

We were made for his glory and we find ourselves empty and hollowed out within when we use our lives to pursue other things. This is why when you go into a time of worship with the right motivations–-to lift up and glorify God above all else–-that you often come out of that time with a sense of fulfillment. Your soul knows that you are living out your purpose, and you are made complete because of it. It is for this same reason that if you enter a time of worship seeking this feeling rather than looking to put God first that you will leave dissatisfied. As soon as you begin to pursue this fulfillment as your main concern it becomes unavailable. It only exists as a by-product of placing God at the center of everything. To chase after an emotional high in a time of worship puts the focus on something other than God and renders that sense of wholeness unobtainable.

We must realize that even though God has given us all specific gifts and abilities that we are to use to pursue the specific purpose he has for our lives, that above all else we were made for his glory! Christ died for love and we are to live for love. It is by doing so–-by living our lives in such a way that we die to ourselves and raise God high–-that we will change our world for the better! By chasing the light of God’s glory in all that we do, we will spread the love of God throughout the world. Where we go he will go, and as he is glorified we will be made fully alive.

“Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” Ephesians 3:20-21

Dive Deep,

Philip

The coolest thing about relationships is that they were not just some random idea that someone thought of, but God came up with the big idea in the first place. In the Garden of Eden, God saw that it was not good for man to be alone so He created woman. Maybe it was God trying to create a better version of man but we believe that when He created man, relationships were also created.  Adam and Eve were quite happy until they fell into sin and had an awkward moment when they tried to hide from God. They were ashamed, so they hid and were eventually thrown out of the Garden. The idea is that we can’t hide when we mess up our relationship with God, and we should strive to be more in tune with Him.

Some of the most common issues that create problems for relationships are bad communication, lack of trust, money or job issues, and selfishness. Relationships that have these problems in existence encounter many awkward moments. Communication is key to a successful relationship. We also must take time to listen to the other party and make an effort to understand what they are trying to tell us. Maybe communication problems will never go away, but we can improve our communication skills to overcome awkward moments in our relationships.

Relationships that do not have a strong basis of trust can create instability. If you think of a rock climber that is repelling down a mountain, that person has to fully trust their belay partner on the ground. If the belayer says they will take care of the climber and follows though with this, it builds greater trust. When the climber is coming down, he or she knows that they are being taken care of and don’t have to carry the burden of stress and uncertainty. The trust in their belay partner causes a bond to be formed. On the flip side, if the rope is always slack even though the belayer said they would take care of them, the climber has to be extra careful to watch where they step so they don’t get hurt. Relationships are a lot like a climber and belayer, you must build trust for each other otherwise it can put great strain and stress on your relationship.

One way that you can communicate a respect for the other person in a relationship is to set boundaries. Most people think that boundaries are in place so that you don’t cross lines, which is correct, but they exist more for the respect of the other person. When you are dating, you should set boundaries early in a relationship and make sure that you clearly communicate these to each other. You should also have freedom to talk openly about your boundaries, and if you notice that you may be getting yourself into situations that lead to compromise, it might be time for you to re-evaluate your relationship and your boundaries. Giving into something you have committed not to do can get you into trouble, and will break down the respect and trust you have tried so hard to build. If you play with fire you will get burned exactly like when you play or cross boundaries, you will get hurt.

So often relationships end up becoming more about what we can get out of them rather than what we can give into them. When we are selfish, we begin only to care about what is best for us. Relationships are not an I but a we adventure. We have to walk though relationships centered on others rather than ourselves. This doesn’t mean that we will never get anything that benefits us, but your relationship will be much stronger if you focus more on your significant other than own yourself. This becomes critical as your relationship moves to higher levels because in the hard times you have to work for each other, not against each other.

Over the next few weeks we will be looking at ways to strengthen your relationship not only with the person you are friends with, dating, engaged, or married to, but also how to grow your relationship to God. We are excited about these series of blogs and hope that you are encouraged to press into deeper relationships.

We have set up a Facebook group for the series that you can be a part of and discuss each week’s post. Check it out at: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=68351964049

Dive Deep,

KC