Extraordinary Faith
Teaching the kids at AWANAs tonight about the faith of Abram (not yet Abraham). He was told by God to leave his country, his kin, his people, his way of life and everything that made him feel secure and comfortable behind and go to a land where everything would be different for him. Not easy today, but imagine the leap in Bible times, and the disconnect he was being asked to make from everything that made him who he was. Fear did get the best of him on at least one occasion, and in the famine that came he fled to Egypt, but this only serves to remind me that he is no different than us. No less human, yet his faith was extraordinary. Thus the question: What makes faith extraordinary? I could try to be cliche and say God is the little extra in the ordinary,...
The completely undeserved “Welcome Home”
If you look over a lot of the posts that I have written in the past couple years for this site, you will see an undercurrent of mild confusion on the Christian life and how I am supposed to live it out. This is especially evident in my last post talking about the difficulty of talking to God in the morning. Well last week, God blew my doors off on my way to work. Through church conversations and reading, I have been more and more shown the importance of the Gospel, that is God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Rom 5:8). His work on the cross is what saves us, not our works thereafter. In light of this, I drove into work listening to a song called “Welcome Home” by a band named Radical Face (good band), and...
An Inconvenient Salvation
We recently had Missions Conference at our church, and four outstanding missionaries shared their burden and their vision for missions with our people. It was very well attended, the love offering for the missionary families was very generous, and in what seemed an all too short time, they were gone. I am left now with the memory of another year in which our people were challenged to think outside the walls of our church and gain a vision that will lead to a burden to do something, and do more to see souls saved. I wonder if anything will change. One of the missionaries spoke on this passage particularly: 2Corinthians 5:14 “For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: 15 And that he died for...
Every Tribe, Tongue, and Nation
Dr. Martin Luther King once said ,“the most segregated hour in America is 11:00 on Sunday morning.” While segregation has been long since abolished (thanks be to God), most evangelical churches I’ve attended don’t have a lot of people of color in their pews. That’s NOT to say that the modern evangelical church is racist. I just think that we, as human beings, tend to naturally gravitate what we are familiar with. The result is our communities, churches, and lives end up being homogeneous. Last week, however, my church decided to try a little experiment. We have a Hispanic church worship at our church every Sunday evening. Sometimes we pass each other and say, “Hola,” but for the most part the two congregations never really interacted. That is,...
God's Method
So many times I see Churches trying to “reinvent the wheel” so to speak. There’s a new program, a new series, a new song, a new building, a new (fill in the blank) that is going to attract attention, regain interest, see souls saved, build momentum, and secure growth to better spread the Gospel. I understand it. There are things in life I get bored with, and even church can get boring at times. (Yes, heathen that I am, I admit I also get bored with church once in a while!) How often have we heard of teenagers who grow up into young adults that leave church, sometimes for a time only to return, and sometimes never to return except on special days, and all because church is boring, or they have heard it all before. How often have new...
Do Christians Care about Pakistan?
I don’t read the Bible nearly as much as I should. I am not quite sure how often it “should” be read by Christians, but I am pretty sure it’s more than “never” which is close to where I am. I do have it permanently resting next to my bed though, so perhaps I am absorbing through osmosis. The paltry reason I have for not reading it too often is also a prideful one. I’ve read it all. Multiple times. Growing up in a Christian home with two parents who are very vocal in their faith means that by the time I was five I was naming all my stuffed animals “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego” (I still think, “and Abendego” would be a kick-ass band name.) However, even though my reading (I guess I should say...