I'm Not Normal. [I Hope You Aren't Either.]

Haha. How's that for a title. Anyways.... Ever since I got back from my 8 day trip with my youth group to North Carolina, I've been listening to Pastor Steven Furtick's sermons online. [www.stevenfurtick.com, click on the "watch sermons online" button.] Furtick was the speaker for our first evening service. And besides being very easy on the eyes [all the females in the audience were having to concentrate very carefully on the message & God, and NOT bemoaning the fact that he was married with 2 children.] he had a GREAT sermon. :)
I also found him on twitter. I favorited this tweet: "Now that was fun. I might never preach to non Pentecostals again. They screamed for me to keep preaching about 40 mins into the msg."
Yeahh buddy. :P Wow. I just stole that from Courtney. I will never do that again. Sorry Courtney, I love ya, but... I don't need another "dude" situation on my hands. [I love you too, Kate. ^_^]
Anyway. Besides the fact that PH kids are some of the most fun kids around [myself included], Furtick's sermon really was good enough that I wish he had kept going a little bit longer. It was on throwing Jonah out of your boat. You know, the sailors would have died if they hadn't eventually thrown Jonah out of their boat. So whether what's keeping you in the storm is a habit, secret, or relationship, you need to throw it out and give it to God. Yadda yadda yadda. It actually was pretty awesome. But I digress.

I've been listening to several more of his regular Sunday morning sermons. My favorite series so far is Cow Tipping [tipping over the church's sacred cows that no one wants to talk about]. But that's not even what I wanted to type about. You need to see cow tipping for yourself.
What I wanted to blog about was his Purple People Leader series. I've only watched the first sermon [writing this takes the place of watching the second, and I don't have time for anything else], and the title of that sermon is "You're Not Normal."

Anyway, he goes on to say that Christians shouldn't be just like everyone else. We're supposed to be different. Peculiar. Strange. Not normal. Unique. But, there's a fine line between being unique and being weird. When we cross that line to weird, then we aren't useful any more because people just think we're weird and won't take us seriously.
So... bottom line: You are special. NOT just like everyone else. God has a vision for your life. You need to be unique to fulfill it. When you are unique you are useful in the hands of God.
However... when you cross the line to weird... you're just.... weird.


That was my mini-stolen-sermon of the day. Yay!
Tina