The blessings of serving
Tonight my church wraps up Vacation Bible School. You know VBS week, that time of year when adults get to dress up in crazy costumes and transport kids to another time or place while sharing the gospel. This year our theme is the Old West, which means that not only did I get to rummage around for some good honky tonk shirts I also got to wear a hat in church. One thing I love about this week is that every year I am reminded of how much of a blessing it is to me to be able to work on something that can have a positive effect on the children of our church and the kids who are visiting. Now, I know that there are some folks who would say that doing anything involving 40-50 screaming children would be more of a curse than a blessing, but to me the...
Obedience
“It is true that perfect and sinless Holiness is not attainable by mortal Men in the present Life, and therefore God is pleased to accept of sincerity of Obedience instead of Perfection; and so we may define Holiness, so far as it is attainable in this imperfect state, to be a sincere and constant desire and endeavour to obey God in all His commands. More than this, we cannot perform, and less than this God will not accept.” from “A Persuasive to a Holy life, From the Happiness That Attends It Both In This World and In the World to Come” by John Ray I used this book as a source recently for a Sunday School lesson on what true happiness is. The author of this old book has a lot to say to modern readers about what mistakes we make about...
Difficulty
A friend of mine posted recently a question on Facebook about “difficult” passages in the bible and how that affects our conception of God. Specifically he was talking about 1 Samuel 15 when God orders the complete destruction of the Amakelites by Saul. The Israelites were to destroy all the men, women and children in the village and then kill all the livestock. Saul had no problem killing all the people, but the best of the livestock was kept for “sacrifice.” Samuel rebukes Saul for not fulfilling all of God’s orders. The Old Testament is littered with the bodies of the enemies of Israel as well as disobedient Israelites. I find these passages extremely troubling to say th eleast. In our modern times, we regard the...
It’s a Miracle!
In our latest adult Sunday School series, we have been studying the Old Testament “Miracle” stories. And it has been interesting because a lot of these stores remained stuck in my mind as kid’s stories because, let’s face it, for most of us our first real exposure was coloring pages, sticker books or flannel graphs involving a large whale or the sun or a talking donkey. And for me, at least, I didn’t think much about these stories again until I began teaching in children’s church. When we were kids, the stories remained largely stores about miracles. In fact, for a lot of the stories, when I started looking at them again, I could only remember the miracle itself and had only a fuzzy recall of what led to the miracle and...
Rapture
So- According to http://www.wecanknow.com/ the rapture is tomorrow. And you know how I found out about it! I find it upsetting when non-believers get such a great chance to mock Christianity. They are able to take this one guy, who by the way has already predicted this once, and use him to make fun of the rest of us. I also wonder why so many folks are obsessed with the end times. We aren’t promised tomorrow anyway. End times or not, we should be living each day as our last, shouldn’t...