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Introduction Our IMAGE high school group has been discussing the topic of relationships and friendships over the past couple weeks. One of these topics was about having unsaved friends and how to interact with them. I'm very excited for our kids to be thinking about this more as we want to have a youth culture in our church that is reaching out to others with the good news of Christ and inviting them into our group to experience the love of Christ while partaking of our community within the church. Where do we get the Idea of Relationships? Relationships were started from the very beginning of time and actually even before that in eternity past. We see in Genesis 1:26 that the triune God has relationship with Himself and from that He creates a man who is meant for relationship in His image (Gen 1:17). That God made man both for relationship with Himself and with other as well (Gen 2:18). Relationship are from God and are "very good" (Gen 1:31). Take a look at Eccl...

This week in our Wednesday night IMAGE meeting we wrapped up our series on the End Times focusing especially on the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21-22. In this section God shows a return to the Garden of Eden... but better, which gives us great hope for our eternal future. Here I just wanted to highlight a few things that stood out to me from our time. 1) In 21:3 we see that God will dwell with man. His presence will be manifested with us for all time. Even in the perfect garden, Gen 3:8-9 seems to indicate that God's manifest presence came and went from Adam and Eve, not that He was ever not present, but in some way less noticeably so. Our hope in the eternal home we will one day posses is that God's presence will always dwell there never to leave in any way. 2) 21:4 & 22:3 show that not only will the curse due to sin and its painful results be removed forever, but, unlike the Garden of Eden where sin happened, there will never be any chance for sin and its painful con...

http://womenandbusiness.co.za/services-5/ When I was attending Christ Seminary in South Africa, I had a professor who used to state, "everything preaches." What he meant was, that whatever you're interacting with in life is pushing you toward thinking a certain way. It is informing you of its creator's worldview and asking you to align with it. Today that "everything" is a continually growing category. It entails movies, tv, music, books, video games, teachers, textbooks, billboards, advertisements, magazines, facebook, instagram, and many others forms of media including this very blog post. =) Typically, as Christians we have two possible responses to this. On the one hand we may recognize this about the movies, music, and many other such things we or our kids listen to and decide it isn't worth the risk and we will simply not partake of those sort of things. On the other hand, we may instead belittle the effects the messages have on us and our th...