Keith Minier started Friday evening’s talk at Momentum Youth Conference by reminiscing about returning from his honeymoon as a 22-year-old in 2001.
“I remember walking into our apartment and thinking, ‘I really want to cherish this woman, I really want to lead our family,'” the pastor of Grace Fellowship, Pickerington, Ohio, remembered. “‘But I don’t have a clue what I’m doing.'”
“I knew how to get married,” he said. “I didn’t know how to be married.”
He compared it with the experience at a conference like Momentum. “We don’t talk about what it means to be a Christian,” he said.
“I had great intentions about what it means to be a husband, and you might have great intentions about what it means to be a Christian in light of this conference,” he added.
He went on to talk about the importance of spiritual discipline in a believer’s life, comparing them to a kind of potter’s wheel that God uses to shape one’s thinking.
He stressed the importance of being resolved in preparation. “You don’t arrive at destinations based on intentions, you arrive based on attention,” he said.
He suggested that those disciplines are a way to a deeper relationship with the creator. “Public reflection is cultivated in private discipline,” he said.
“We need to consider the importance of environments,” he said, providing three ways to pursue spiritual discipline. “Think about the environments we are in and see if they stir our affection and admiration for God,” he added. “If you are in environments where there are certain things long enough, you’ll end up being drawn to those things.”
“Understand the reality of the process,” he said. “Your experience about salvation will never be completely full on this side of glory. You’ll continually struggle to be transformed.”
“Have a mindset of urgency,” he concluded, noting that as we dwell on God, we’ll dwell less on the things of the earth.
“I begin to think about people and I see their days are numbered,” wondering aloud if we are concerned that the people we love might go to hell.
Saturday is the last full day of the conference. It begins a 9:30 a.m. send-off as students spread throughout northcentral Indiana to minister in the community.
They return to campus in time for dinner and the 7:30 p.m. evening session, where Jeff Bogue will speak.