Rick Burgess...Now He "Gets it"!

A friend of mine emailed me the link to watch Rick Burgess basically preaching at his own son's funeral. Rick is an award winning radio show host who was at a youth event for 7,000 kids. He gets the call that his baby son has drowned in a pool accident, and preaches an amazing message at his own son's funeral.

In my last blog I made the statement that we have to "get it". Meaning that I have to grasp the gospel in a way that my life is so changed that people around me know that Jesus is involved in the situation! Rick made the statement that he knew people were going to be watching him and thinking "ok man, where is this God of yours now?" But already, in a matter of days, hundreds and thousands of people have not only heard the gospel of Jesus Christ, but they are seeing the power of it lived out in a man and his family!

One of my favorite verses in the New Testament is Romans 1:16, where the Apostle Paul writes, "For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes..." Rick Burgess is perhaps the greatest earthly example of that power that I have ever seen! He "gets it". He stands on the platform, looks at his other four kids and tells them not to waste their lives living by what the world may say or do, but that the only things that will ever truly matter are those things they do for the Kingdom of God and then he challenges them to be soldiers in the battle! Amazing!

So, what have you done for the advancing of God's Kingdom today? Rick states that 90% of "Christians" (and I put that in quotes because so many in this country claim to be something they are not), do not or have not shared the gospel with a lost and dieing world. God can allow a tragedy like this to reach hundreds of thousands of people, but He can also use us to reach a family member, friend or co-worker. What are you going to do?

Like I said in the last post, we need to get over the "well I am saved and going to heaven" mindset, we need to realize that God poured out His wrath on Jesus so that He would not have to pour it out on us. So that the Creator and Sustainer of all things could have a relationship with us, He became flesh and took on the sins of the world literally in His body, endured the most heinous punishment known to man and died, just to give us life! He was raised from the dead and sent His Spirit to empower us to do things like Rick Burgess is doing in the face of the death of his very own son.

Please, lets stop playing around with this and make a radical difference in the places that we live! Man, lets cut the @#&% and get fired up about Jesus! Rick says that the one thing we can do to honor his family in this tragedy is join him in exposing this as the dumbest thing Satan ever did and make him pay! Lets just do it!

"For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son..." (Romans 5:10). Can we all start living like people who were once enemies of God but are now made right with Him through the death of Jesus, can we just do that?

If you have not seen the Rick Burgess videos at YouTube, here is the link. Please watch it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PUHUZWyFeg - this is just the first one, there are three and they are all about 9 minutes long. Please watch them!!