We had a great time Wednesday night, around a camp fire, singing praise, and learning about God.  This article sums up what we talked about pretty well.

It was almost the end of the day; we had been playing for 6 hours straight in 90 degree weather.  It was hot, it was sticky, and I was tired.  But here I was preparing for another match on the paintball field, everything seemed to be fine, it was about the 10th game in a row I had played in.  Before we started I started to check to make sure I was ready to go, I had plenty of paintballs in my hopper, my gun was working, and my team had already come up with a game plan.  I was ready to go.  As the whistle sounded I ran as fast as I could (don’t laugh) to the nearest Dorito (It’s a big thing that you can hid behind that looks like, guess what, a dorito).  As I stood behind the Dorito I noticed something, I couldn’t see any of their players.  As I looked back I couldn’t see any of my players either.  I was a sitting duck.  Somehow over the last 10 games, with a little more paint being smeared on my mask each game, with a little more sweat getting on the lenses, and with a little more fog forming on my goggles, I had finally gotten to the point where I couldn’t see anything.  Of course I wouldn’t have run onto a field knowing I wasn’t going to be able to see, but because it happened just a little bit at a time over the course of the day I never knew I was heading for total blindness until it was too late.  At that point I was useless and my goggles needed a cleaning.  So needless to say the results for my team were disastrous.  At least I learned a very important lesson that day, it’s one many of us learn way too late in life.  It’s the little things that build up and cause the biggest problems.  This is especially true when it comes to sin.  If we are honest with each other, as adults, when it comes to sin we all know the Bible says that all sin is the same, but we still tend to separate our sins into “Big” sins and “Little” sins.  We justify our “little” sins and continuing in them, thinking that it’s not that bad, but they begin to pile up, so much that it gets to the point where we can’t see as clearly as we did at the point when we first surrendered to Jesus.  Our view of our sin then becomes so clouded that we start to justify more and more of those “little” sins into our lives until our “little” sins have become “big” ones.  When our view becomes clouded, we don’t see the fact that it was these “little” sins that nailed Jesus to the cross.  Think back to Adam, what did he do wrong?  God told him not to eat a piece of fruit and he did.  Honestly, if you or I did this would we consider it a big deal?  God said don’t and he did.  That one “little” sin brought the curse upon all of mankind.  In its simplest form it was just disobedience to God and we do that all the time right?  I mean we gossip all the time and don’t see anything wrong with it even though God says in His word not to.  We tell little white lies sometimes even under the guise of trying not to hurt someone’s feelings, even though God said we shouldn’t bear false witness.  I think it’s this slow blinding to our sin and our depravity that has caused the church to be where it is today.  We are blind; we look around just as I did on the paintball field, we don’t see our enemies, we don’t see our team, and we can not tell what is really going on and when this happens we become a hindrance to our team and a hindrance to the work of God.  So how can we fix this problem?  We need to awaken and start seeing ALL our sin for what it really is, it’s the thing that caused our savior to be nailed to the cross, we will then start to see how far we have fallen and how far God had to come to redeem us, we start to see the richness of His mercy and His grace, and we are put back into our rightful place as servants of the Living God, not as a people whom God owes something.  So as we begin this time of revival, maybe it’s time that we own up to all the sin in our lives, bring it to God, run from it, and understand who he is and how far he has brought us.  It’s time to Awaken….

BTW I have plenty of left over smores for Sunday Morning