Message Title: Essentials of a Deeper Life (2 of 2)
Sermon in a Sentence: The way to a deeper spiritual life with strong roots that can withstand the challenges of life starts with spiritual HABITS.

Key Verse: Still other seeds fell on fertile soil, and they produced a crop that was thirty, sixty, and even a hundred times as much as had been planted! Matthew 13:8

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 5 out of 10. This is a short series that connects our summer efforts to our Fall Kickoff next weekend. The look and feel for the series is nice, and this has a solid “back to school / start the year off right” sort of direction to it.

Service Length: 63 minutes
Understandable Message: HABITS is a classic PDYM acrostic for Hang Time with God, Accountability with another believer, Bible Memorization, Involvement in Church, Tithing and Study Scripture. We worked to make each point memorable – for the Hang time with God we had a student come on stage and read a passage from the 1-Minute Bible while we put a timer on the screen. The goal was to not encourage racing through devotions, but helping them understand to get a starting point for a daily connection with God.

Element of Fun/Positive Environment: We had a little skit before the talk this weekend, we called up 4 volunteers on stage and had them (with a preassigned student narrator and one staff person) reinact the Matthew 13 parable of the seeds. So dry … so awesome. I the welcome/introduction, we played this pogo stick video that everyone loved/cringed at. During the talk we also played this funny tithing video that got a strong reaction as well. Killball after the 2nd Saturday night service also created an amazing amount of energy in the crowd.

Favorite Moment: I opened up with a story about going in my parents attic last week on vacation and finding some old toys (the 1985 Robotech Transformer was my favorite) so I brought it on stage to talk about not just growing “up” but growing “deep.” Taffy, our song leader for the series, ran up and we timed how fast he could transform it from jet to robot. I think his personal best was like 20 seconds or so. So fun, made for a nice conclusion, too.