Jim Carpenter

In my time with God earlier this week, He told me to just be still, be quiet, & LISTEN (really he said SHUT UP & LISTEN). What HE has to say is WAY BETTER than ANYTHING I could come up with!! So, here goes…

• 7 people surrendered their lives to Jesus today…6 students on Wednesday night @ The 706 – why we do what we do!!
• If you have a Middle or High School Student - GO HERE NOW & SIGN THEM UP FOR CAMP – most important thing you can do this summer!!!!!
• Talked about GENEROSITY today – I really am asking God to change my heart and this church’s heart to be THE MOST GENEROUS CHURCH on the planet!!!!
• Honestly, I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but do know it’s what we’re called to.
• These verses will MESS YOU UP - 1 Timothy 6:17-19, Proverbs 11:24-25, 2 Corinthians 9:6-11
• Hey, if you don’t believe you are RICH, go here and type in your salary.
• I’m wrestling with the question – “If Compass wasn’t here…or the local church for that matter…would anybody miss us?”
• I want us to become known as the church who gave their lives away and lived like Jesus!!
• The MOST GENEROUS person I know was JESUS – He gave His life for me!! (2 Corinthians 9:15)
• Thanks for being MESSED UP enough as a church to do something about it – the Marta Givens Video story on Sunday about adopting 3 children from Haiti was AMAZING and challenged me BIG TIME!!
• Yes, it’s true…own it…most Christians are not GENEROUS because we’re GREEDY…
• …but, I also believe there’s another layer below that – we don’t understand GOD’S GRACE!!
• THAT ALONE BLOWS me away – when I look at the cross, it makes me want to put Him FIRST and give Him my VERY BEST!!
• If you have an issue with Generosity, it’s a HEART problem, NOT a money problem (Matthew 6:21)
• Some of you are blessed with a burden – a heart that is disturbed enough to take action.
• Don’t Complain, Avoid, or Appease it, but rather let it MESS with you and MOVE you to Action!!
• By the way – that’s what God did – John 3:16!!!!
• I’m praying for a heart that asks “What can I GIVE UP FOR God, rather than what can I GET FROM God?!!”
• I love the story of Nehemiah because his first response was “LET’S DO THIS!!”
• Nehemiah’s heart was DISTURBED enough to take action, BROKEN by his disobedience, and was WILLING to give EVERYTHING!!
• Jesus never said “I want SOMETHING.” He said, “I want EVERYTHING!!”
• I don’t have all the answers and I don’t even know the questions…but I DO KNOW God has made a BIG ASK of His church, He has strategically PLACED us here, and He wants us to BE OBEDIENT and GENEROUS however He Prompts us!!
• LET’S DO THIS!!!!!!!!!

• READ the Old Testament book of NEHEMIAH chapters 1-4 to get your heart ready for Sunday!
• ASK God to show you a NEED you can meet in someone else’s life before Sunday!!
• INVITE a FRIEND to come to church with you this Sunday!!!
• PRAY like crazy for God to Show UP and Show OFF BIG in this city and your life on Sunday!!!!

Invite your friends via email.

Invite your friends via Facebook.

Please pray for us as many of our staff and volunteers will be attending UNLEASH today with Pastor Perry Noble at New Spring Church in Anderson, SC.

This will be our third time to go together. God has always used this day and event to mess me up, challenge me in big ways, renew, refresh, and refuel me, help me fall more in love with Jesus, and make me more excited and passionate about the local church than ever before. YEA – Can’t Wait to see how God moves at UNLEASH today.

For those that wanted to go but somehow couldn’t make it this year, I just found out they will be streaming the two Main Sessions LIVE…and FOR FREE!  Just Go To This Link Today…the two live sessions will begin at 9:00am and 3:30pm EST…it would be AWESOME for you to join us!!

6 Students surrendered their lives to Christ last night at 706 – BAM POW!!!! That’s WHY we do what we do!!

I CAN’T WAIT to begin our new series “LET’S DO THIS” this Sunday!!! This is a GREAT SERIES to bring a guest to!!!!

Buffets are definitely NOT my favorite place to eat. I typically choose NOT to eat at them if at all possible. However, buffets remind me that all of us in life get to “Pick and Choose.”

As I begin to reflect on all that God has done over the past three weeks, I am blown away! As you are aware, we started a new series, Worship Him, which focuses on The Reason We are Called to Worship, How We were Created to Worship, and How To Worship God with Your Life, and not just during a Sunday Experience.

Three weeks ago at the beginning of the series kickoff, God showed up and showed off more than I honestly had expected in seeing the people show up with open hearts, and open minds, READY to experience Him, and Go to the NEXT level of Worship! We also did live worship in the Elementary Kids Service during the first week!

This past Sunday topped it all off. I had the opportunity to interview several different leaders who are a part of our Music Team and asked them three questions: (1) When and How did you find God? (2) What does worship mean to you, and how do you choose to worship God? (3) How would you encourage people to worship God with their life apart from just during a Sunday experience?

To be able to hear their hearts and see the impact and response from the people was amazing. After the video segments, I personally challenged the people to examine their hearts in asking themselves, “Do you worship God with everything you have, every single day, is He your number one?…” – And here is what it is all about, in the 2nd service alone at least 4 people entered into a relationship with Jesus Christ. – Come on Jesus!

God is up to something BIG! We can’t see exactly what it is, but I encourage you to hold on, trust Him, remain faithful, and Worship Him with your life every single day!

This upcoming Sunday will be the last week of our Worship Him series, you will not want to miss it. Don’t come alone, invite your family and friends, and come ready to go to another level in worshiping God!

Remember this – Your life will not be blessed, if you are not blessing Him!

I love serving with every single one of you!

Matt

Guest blog post by Chase McKissick, Children’s Pastor

One of the best Sundays of my tenure on staff here at Compass Church happened just two Sundays ago.   It was the first Sunday of the merge and the energy in the church was incredible.  From the parking lot to the stage there was an excitement and buzz around this place and an expectation that God was going to show up in a powerful way!

Then… sure enough He did!  It was incredible to walk into the back of the worship center and see it packed full of people singing praise to God and to see so many people with “arms high and heart abandoned”.  The spirit of God was all over that worship center in that moment as we came together as one body.

As amazing as that experience was it could only be topped by my experience that day in Compass Kids.  We decided that as we kicked off our new worship series it was time to take our kids’s worship to a whole new level.   So for the first time, we had the incredible 706 band lead Compass Kids in worship.  It took the kids a little bit of time (especially for the older ones) to stop worrying about what they looked like to their friends standing around them, but pretty soon the kid’s theater was filled with the same spirit of worship that everyone experienced in the adult service.

Seeing so many kids in such a short period of time learn and then experience what it means to worship was an event that challenged me to the core.  Seeing so many little kids genuinely raise their hands in worship and sing praise to God reminded me that we are truly wired to worship. What if I was like some of the youngest kids in the theater that day in my worship to God?

What if I let go of everything that gets between me and God and truly worshiped Him like a child?  What if we were like that in our worship to God as a church? Maybe this is part of what Jesus meant when he said, “unless you change and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).

This Sunday at Compass we continue our “Worship Him” series.  I invite you to join us as we seek to experience that same kingdom Jesus spoke of by learning more of what it means to worship Him like a child.

As the Student Pastor at Compass Church, I have the privilege of challenging our students to give their lives to Jesus and pursue Him.  One of the most difficult things to show them is God’s faithfulness and why they should continually worship Him.

In our culture today, we all have to fight the desire of instant gratification and a “what have you done for me lately” mindset.  At times, students will tell me that God is not there for them.  Look around. We live in world of high speed internet; we can retrieve information at the touch of a finger, 5 minute dinners and a scrolling sports update on ESPN networks.

This has created a scary trend in my life as well.  At times, I battle feeling like worshipping God with my life because of a notion that He has failed me.  The fact that I somehow believe that God has failed me leads me to fail Him. It hinders me from offering the only thing that I have to give God, my worship. There is absolutely nothing else to offer or anything else He wants from me.

Why worship?

Psalm 103:1-5

Praise the LORD, O my soul;
all my inmost being, praise his holy name.

Praise the LORD, O my soul,
and forget not all his benefits-

who forgives all your sins
and heals all your diseases,

who redeems your life from the pit
and crowns you with love and compassion,

who satisfies your desires with good things
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

I do not deserve anything else from God; He has rescued me from death and has given me hope. That’s enough! If He never did anything else for me, He has been more generous than I deserve.

So I encourage you to be reminded of the joy of your salvation and Worship Him.

–Guest blog post by Paul Sims, Creative Arts and Administrative Pastor–

This past Sunday we showed a video that I had been excited about ever since we began planning our Worship Him series.  We called the video A Life of Worship.  The reason I was so excited about it was because we wanted to illustrate how worship is more than just what we experience together on Sunday mornings.  How we worship God personally throughout the week has a tremendous impact on our relationship with Him.

If you didn’t get a chance to see the video this Sunday, here it is.

One of my favorite ways to worship God is to ponder who He is.  Any little thing can set me off on a journey to learn something new about who God is, how He thinks, and how He loves.  I can be sitting at a stop light and I’ll start thinking about how our eyes work and how God makes these little blobs in our heads capable of using chemicals and electrical pulses to see the most incredible things.  It tells me that God has an intricate mind that engineers amazing things, but also has a taste for tremendous aesthetics in what He creates.  He loves beauty and order.

In those few moments sitting at a stoplight I’m brought to my knees (not literally of course because that would be a bit difficult in the drivers seat), and I worship Him as I ponder who He is. Psalms 111:1-4 says:

¹ Praise the Lord!   I will thank the Lord with all my heart
as I meet with his godly people.
² How amazing are the deeds of the Lord!
All who delight in him should ponder them.
³ Everything he does reveals his glory and majesty.
His righteousness never fails.
⁴ He causes us to remember his wonderful works.
How gracious and merciful is our Lord!

This week, how have you pondered who God is, or delighted in the great things He’s done in your life?