Imperial Valley Christian Center

File this under, For Entrepreneurs Only. Loved this quote from Paul Graham, a venture capitalist, entrepreneur type guy:

At the moment, even the smartest students leave school thinking they have to get a job. Actually what they need to do is make something valuable.

This is part a much larger article, What Business Can Learn From Open Source, basically trying to answer the question: Why do people who produce open source software, (I.e. software that is in the public domain. That doesn't have copyrights attached to it, for which no money exchanges hands. A good example is Firefox a really good, free, fast, web browser I'm in fact using to type this entry.) produce better products than paid employees of a large company?

I guess his answer is that love triumphs over money. One of the reasons there aren't more entrepreneurs in the world is because most people want security. They'd like to have the rewards associated with risk but they don't want to have to experience the pain thereof. Most people end up keeping their talents buried in the ground for fear of loosing them. Most spend their lives in slavery to mammon rather than take the risk of serving God. Most would rather stay in Ur than have to live by faith. There are, no doubt, thousands of Pastors who'd like to have Joel Osteen's job, but there aren't many guys willing to endure what John Osteen, his father, had to go through to get Joel to where he is today.

What should a spiritually healthy Christian look like?

Galatians 5:22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 23 Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. 24 And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. 25 If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.

The fruit of the spirit (I'm using lowercase "spirit" because I believe this scripture is referring to your human spirit not to the Holy Spirit, but I don't really want to get into that right now.) is love, joy and peace etc. The product of a spiritually healthy Christian life is, love, joy and peace. When people see a spiritually mature Christian they should see love, joy and peace. If a Christian isn't walking around full of joy then they are spiritually sick. If a Christian isn't walking around full of love then something is wrong with them spiritually speaking. If a Christian isn't walking around full of peace then they're like an apple tree that doesn't produce apples, or a rose bush that doesn't produce roses, something is amiss.

This is what we should look like, full of love, full of joy, and full of peace. Every step we take away from love or joy or peace is a step away from abiding in Christ. But how do we get there. If we are to manifest the true Christian life in the world we are going to have to learn to renew our minds. If we're going to walk in love, joy and peace, we're going to have to learn to control our thought life. In order to truly live out the Christian life in this world we must learn to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.

Okay here's the audio version. This is last Sunday's service, lasts about 57 minutes, about 27mb. On the Greg scale of 1-10 10 being best a 7 for anointing a 5 for delivery.

MP3 Audio