Music Monday (Kristian Stanfill)

Hello everyone,

This is a new blog that i’m starting called Music Monday. My goal with this blog is just to let all you fellow bloggers and readers know about certain artist that i really dig right now and artist that have inspired me. I can’t take credit for the idea of this blog though, Kayleigh Bledsoe, my roommates girlfriend, gave me the idea so click on her name to check out her blogs.

This Music Monday is about an artist named Kristian Stanfill. Kristian is one of the worship leaders at 722 in Atlanta Georgia. The first time i ever heard of Kristian was when i saw him make a guest appearance at Passion Conference 06 in Nashville Tennessee during Chris Tomlin’s evening worship set. I was honestly blown away by his energy and ability to engage. He lead in two songs that evening, “Jesus Paid it All” and “Salvation is here”, and after he was done i said to myself, “I want to lead like that”. Kristian has definitely been a huge inspiration in my passion for worship music and my desire to lead people in authentic worship with excitement and overwhelming joy for what Christ has done for us.

The video below is a song called “Spring of Life”, written by Kristian. We played this song this past Sunday at C3 and it was very powerful. It simply proclaims that:

Jesus You’re the well that won’t run dry,

Jesus You’re the drink that satisfies,

Living water, Spring of life!

Jesus is what the world is searching for, He alone will satisfy that emptiness inside each one of us. We try to fill the emptiness with money, drugs, success, fame, ect… but nothing will satisfy but Christ!

Talking to God (its amazing that we can)

Hey guys, let me just say that last Sunday was amazing, we had a ton of people show up for our launch service in the theaters. The first service was at 90% capacity and in the second service we had about two seats left, so it was awesome. And if you didn’t come this past week and plan on coming next week don’t worry about not finding a seat because we are moving into a larger theater. Wow! After the first official service we already have to move into a bigger theater. God is amazing. Pastor Byron had an awesome message and it was overall the most amazing morning ever. The volunteers continue to blow me away with their dedication to the vision of C3 church by showing up so freakin early every Sunday morning. They truly are the people that make it all happen at C3 church.

Lately I have been struggling with spending time talking to God. The more I neglected our relationship the further away from Him I fell, and honestly I felt miserable. I spent a while in prayer this afternoon and it was so incredibly refreshing. I want to encourage anyone who is struggling with there relationship with God to pray out loud or write out your prayer, do anything to stay focused on talking to God, I know I was struggling with focus but it’s a lot easier when I pray out loud. When I am not growing in my relationship with God and I am walking around in darkness, and that is a scary place to be. As a Christian I am never sitting in one place, either I am growing in Christ or I am falling away. This life is too short not to live in 110% in pursuit of Christ.

This busy life!

In my life i get so busy sometimes that i tend to slowly lose sight of God and my purpose for being here. I wake up in the morning and, instead of taking a few minutes to spend talking to God and getting focused on Him so that He can use me in every way possible that day, I rush to start checking off things on my to do list. This is extremely dangerous in the life of a Christian because it causes us to start depending on our own knowledge and strength, and to think less and less about God and His will for our lives. I know I’m not the only one who struggles with this and it would be easy to hide this and pretend that i am Mr. super Christian, but then what help would i be to those around me who are experiencing the very same thing.

I stumbled across this video i hadn’t seen in a while called “just stop and think” by Francis Chan. It really brought me back to the basics of life and living for Christ, and i would encourage anyone that is reading this to check it out. Just click here. It is a short video but it is very stinkin powerful.

No more formulas or self-help books please!!!

This is something that has been on my mind a lot lately. For the longest time i viewed spiritual intimacy with God as something that could only be obtained through a process or some type of man made formula, as if one day someone stumbled upon a certain way to become intimate with God. Also, i use to read the Bible as if it were some sort of self help book and if i read it i would experience some sort of epiphany and incur another missing piece to this puzzle we call life. But ever since i’ve moved to Orlando and truly started to understand the vision of C3 church my view of all of that radically change.

I am currently reading a book called “Searching for God Knows What” by Donald Miller, and a lot of what i read in it today really made sense. So below is a list of quotes from it that will hopefully help you see why formulas don’t work and why the bible shouldn’t be viewed as some sort of self-help book.

Jesus was always, and i mean always, talking about love, about people, about relationship, and He never once broke anything into steps or formulas.

Earthly love is temporal and slight so that it has to be given again and again in order for us to feel any sense of security; but God’s love, God’s voice and presence, would instill our souls with such affirmation we would need nothing more and would cause us to love other people so much that we would be willing to die for them.

The God of the bible seemed to be brokenhearted over the separation in our relationship and downright obsessed with mending the tear.

What if we stopped looking at the rules and lists and formulas and rather looked through them at the larger and more obvious picture? What if the motive behind our theology was relational?

Jesus said the bottom line is to love God and love others. matt. 22:37-39

I guess the main point i am trying to make with this blog is that following Christ is not about a list of rules or certain formulas, its all about realizing how HUGE God is and how small we are, it’s about realizing how much God loves us and spreading that contagious love to others. Many people are way too focused on recreating a feeling or emotion and spend there life chasing that, which to me seems very self-centered and not very God-centered. God is not a re creator… He is a creator. He draws us to Him through his love and once we experience that love its not something we want to keep to ourselves, its something we want everyone to know and experience. So my heart, now more than ever before, longs to introduce others to that love, the love that Christ displayed on the cross. And I believe that is the way God intends all Christians and all churches to be.