I AM BLOG.

The Open Door will be hosting Godfest ‘09 from October 16 to 18. The purpose of Godfest is to celebrate God and His church! A lot of times as Christians, we are so focused on our own churches that sometimes we lose sight of the bigger picture–THE Church, AKA, the Body of Christ.

Godfest will be a time where we can rally with churches from all over Southern California as One body. Our goal is to encourage and learn from one another and most definitely fellowship with one another! There will be guest speakers as well as seminars that all Christians will be able to relate to.

Hope to see you there! And here’s a flier for your visual enjoyment:

Oh, add @Godfest on Twitter for a chance to win a FREE ESV STUDY BIBLE! We’ll be giving away a Bible every time we add 25 new followers. Spread the word and receive the… Word! I am so clevar!

My nephews and niece are impossibly cute. Our church is slowly taking shape. I cut 20 strokes from the last time I golfed. Did a lot this weekend. Much of it involved family, golf, and church. Can’t get much better than that.

I need to study.

“By the power vested in the state of Iowa and God, I now declare you legally married,” said the couple’s pastor, Peg Esperanza of the CHS Rainbow Cyber Church.

“What an honor,” Esperanza added. “Amen!” — USA Today

The first same-sex marriage license was issued today in Iowa. While reading the article, I came across this particular sentence and had to do a double take. What? By the power of God, homosexuals are being married? Really? I’m sorry, but that’s something that I cannot say, “amen” to.

Aside from legal issues of gay marriage and rights and what not, how can we say that God would condone a union between man and man or woman and woman? Clearly the Bible shows us that God does NOT condone these things. How can someone marry a homosexual couple in God’s name?

The couple was married by the CHS Rainbow Cyber Church. I looked up their church online and their mission statement reads as: “Our mission is to promote BELIEF in Jesus Christ, to BUILD understanding of God’s love for all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender, through the Holy Spirit, and BRIDGE diverse communities by celebrating our uniqueness.”

I can agree with them for the most part. I do believe that as Christians, we should love homosexuals and any other person as much as we love the members of the Body of Christ. There’s no disagreement there. But then they have sermons posted on their site that advocate that homosexuality is NOT a sin. Well, it IS a sin. I’m not saying that homosexuality is more of sin than any other sin you can think of (both “small” and “big”). Sin is sin, and sin keeps us from God. To marry a sinful couple in God’s name doesn’t work. Our Holy God does not approve of sin.

Homosexuality is just as much as a sin as my own pride, laziness, lust, etc. But as Christians, we need to recognize when we are living in sin and ask for God’s forgiveness and to move away from these sins. It’s sin that keeps us away from God. Once we start to say that certain sins are OK and that God allows them is wrong. I’ll say it again to make myself clear: We should love all people regardless of their sins, just as Jesus would have. However, we cannot allow ourselves to live in our sinful nature and think that it’s OK just because Jesus loves us.

Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace. –Romans 6:11-14