I’m doing a video series about temptation called The Invisible War with my high school small group students. The series was created by Rick Warren. In the lessons, he talks about how Jesus quoted scripture in the face of temptation. I thought if that was what worked for Jesus, then we should follow his model. [...]

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Tonight at The Landing, we played a trivia game to illustrate the stress in our lives brought on by things we won’t admit to. It worked out pretty well. Supplies needed: – Random props of various sizes (we had about 50 – ranging from a straw to a huge stuffed animal to cinder blocks) – [...]

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Last night I taught on Ephesians 4:31, “Get rid of all bitterness, rage, and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.” and Matthew 5:8, “Happy are the pure in heart.” I wanted students to be able to visualize the concept of having these things in their heart, so I went to Lowe’s [...]

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I taught this lesson to my small group guys tonight. It seemed to hit home pretty well. — Subscriptions I have: – Gym membership – a smoking great deal at $50/year – Disneyland – $30/month – Cell phone – $94/month These are all subscriptions I have. I can cancel them at any time. I might [...]

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This week my co-leader taught on Luke 7:36-50 – The woman pours oil on Jesus’ feet. We assume, possibly incorrectly, that this woman was a prostitute. Based on the verses, however, that is a good educated guess. If this is true, then an expensive alabaster jar of perfume would have been likely a “tool of [...]

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At The Landing once a month we have an activity we do as our opener. Students write questions on cards and hand them to their table leader to censor (we don’t tell them it’s so they can be censored). The leader chooses a few of the questions to ask one student at the table. Now [...]

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If you’re using The Landing program at your church, you may be interested in this handout I made for lesson 14. Click here to download it as a PDF document

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This post is written for churches running The Landing curriculum (Celebrate Recovery for students). This is a great program we’re doing on Friday nights at Saddleback Church to help students (Jr and Sr high) deal with their hurts, habits and hangups in life. – We put Week 13′s verses and questions in a Microsoft Word [...]

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Last night part of the lesson I taught at The Landing was about Zaccheaus. We had a lot of fun and got everybody involved with the story. Here’s how it went… We had a little fun with Lesson 12 and the Zacchaeus verses (Luke 19). I had a short kid stand up in the balcony [...]

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For the past two weeks, I’ve been teaching my guys on 1 John. Tonight we stumbled across an interesting concept through our discussion. It was about character traits and the triggers that set them off. The character traits are like switches, the triggers are outside stimuli. For instance, we all have inner character switches; greed, [...]

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