//BAGGAGE//

This past week was pretty amazing in student ministry at NLC. The middle school service started a new series about connecting disconnected people, and the high school service started a new series called "Baggage." I'd like to take just a second and focus on the latter.

The big idea was this:

"Until we learn to let God carry our burdens, instead of carrying them ourselves, our relationship with God, and our relationships with other will continue to deteriorate."

So for those of you who missed it, let me give you the brief summary of how to do just that. The key to giving your burdens to God is FORGIVENESS. Without forgiveness, we carry around things like bitterness, anger, resentment, jealousy, worry, and hurt. While in reality, if we would forgive the people or the situations that caused these feelings, we would be trusting God to handle them for us. When you do that, 3 results ultimately take place:

-Your Relationship with God gets closer, because you are learning to trust in his works, and not your own.

-Your realtionships with others gets a lot less complicated. Why? Because you are no longer carrying around these negative feelings towards people that have negative effects on your relationships.

-You begin to live in freedom. Not just pithy "I can do what I want" freedom. But the kind of freedom that Jesus talked about, when he said, "If the Son has set you free, you are free indeed!"

When Jesus died on the cross, he bought our healing. He died so that we could be free...free from worry, free from guilt, free from resentment, etc.

Now, does that mean these feelings wont come up? NO! But we can learn how to quickly give our baggage over to the greatest baggage-handler of all...Jesus Christ! And that's what we are going to be focusing on this week...so don't miss it!

Plus, FEARFACTOR is on again. We've got 7 people left. What are we going to do next...join us to find out! And don't forget...FREE BREAKFAST for all High Schoolers this Sunday...so come early. See you Sunday!