Awakening - Chris Hill

Okay, night one of the Awakening Conference was the perfect kick-off to the event. Worship was led by Bobby Perry & Rain. WHOA! They came last year and blew everyone away, this year was no different. The energy of this group not to mention the musical excellence is uncanny. Most, if not all of the singers and musicians, are Berkley School of Music graduates/students. You add all of that up with the desire to worship God and...wowzers! You get an unbelievable experience.

Then Chris Hill came up and almost made me quit preaching. The message - undeniably impacting. He preached from the book of Kings with the recalling of how Elijah was taken up and how Elisha took his mantle. We've all heard that one before, right? Right. Then, he broke down how Elisha tore off his outer garment and put on Elijah's mantle. From that he began to break down how God has some of us in a new season and the garments from our old season won't fit anymore so they need to be torn off so that we can put on our new mantle. Sound encouraging? I'm doing it ZERO justice because it was delivered in a way that only Chris Hill (and MAYBE his pastor TD Jakes) could do it. He spent about 30-40 minutes pulling out absolute GEMS from these scriptures. When he gave a call for prayer concerning the message - most of the youth LEADERS in the place were face down on the alter.

Why did this almost make me quit preaching? Because this message was pure excellence in exegesis, a perfect harmony of homily, a symphony of scripture searching - and he wrote it THAT MORNING! It takes me a MINIMUM of a day to pull out half of the stuff he did. That message would have taken me a LONG time to write - IF that message would have come to me at all. Chris Hill, writes it THAT MORNING!

Fantastic message and DEFINATELY some stuff to chew on from it. Then, once we closed in worship - service didn't end until well after 10pm. And that was just day ONE.

Tomorrow, I'll highlight the leadership session with Marco DeBarros (conference host), the afternoon session where I got to rock the mic and the message from Mike Servello.