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Art of Our Discontent
Trevin Wax asks these questions: How do unbelievers know we are Christians? By the fish symbols on our car? By our bumper stickers? By our voting patterns? By our church attendance? No. Jesus tells us that the outside world will know we are Christians by the way we love one another. (John 13.34-35; 1 John…
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How to – or NOT to – Read Your Bible
How should we read our Bibles? There are a number of good ways. But Dane Ortland offers some suggestions about how not to approach it: The Gold Mine Approach – reading the Bible as a vast, cavernous, dark mine, in which one occasionally stumbles upon a nugget of inspiration. Result: confused reading. The Hero Approach…
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5 Reasons Church Leaders Quit
Why do so many church leaders quit or go into early permanent retirement? This is epidemic these days. According to Pastor in Residence, a ministry aimed at restoring ministry casualties back to active duty, at any given time as many as 33% of American pastors consider throwing in the towel. And this is not a…
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Erasing Hell
Recent discussion about Judgement and Hell, spurred largely by a recent book by Rob Bell, have prompted many to rethink what they believe – what Scripture teaches – about this subject. Among them, Francis Chan in this video titled Erasing Hell. I had thought I was done with this thread, but Chan’s reflections warrant hearing.
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Living Together as the Church
The late theological statesman, Edmund Clowney observed: “If we lack interest in the church we lack what was for Jesus a consuming passion. Jesus loved the church and gave himself for it (Ephesians 5.25).” Jesus’ love for his church is evident throughout the pages of the New Testament. In Matthew 16.18 Jesus promises to build his…
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This Present Communion
“We are justified if we have accepted Christ as Savior. But present communion with God requires continual bowing in both the intellect and the will. Without bowing in the intellect, in thinking after God; without acting upon the finished work of Christ in my present life; and without bowing in the will in practice, as…
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What Makes a Good Church?
Steve Erickson of Pointway Church in Baxter, Minnesota serves up some up beat thoughts to the question: What makes a good church? “What makes a good church? If all the… …Lazy folks get up …sleepy folks wake up …Discouraged folks cheer up …Gossiping folks shut up …Dishonest folks fess up …Estranged folks make up …Depressed…
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Shallow Small Groups
OK… This might make some folks cringe a little – especially some Small Group junkies… But this is just too funny!
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Organic Church
You will observe that I am not merely exhorting you “to go to church.” “Going to church” is in any case good. But what I am exhorting you to do is go to your own church – to give your presence and active religious participation to every stated meeting for worship of the institution as…
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How to Disarm an Angry Person
It is the most difficult of maneuvers. There are no guarantees of success. And the stakes are high. But we have no choice: we must learn how to do it. How do you disarm an angry person? The angry person could be a child, parent, spouse, friend, neighbor or counselee. And, of course, we could…
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Revival: The Restoration of the Holy Spirit to This Place
To understand aright what this teaching of the Spirit is, there are three things we must specially remember: The first, that it is all from within. It is by influencing, by renewing, by purifying the life, that the Spirit gives the experimental knowledge of God’s truth. Out of the light of life, wrought within our…
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Being a Transforming Presence
As followers of Jesus it is as imperative for us to fight every inclination toward dualism as it is to fight against legalism. While legalism is widely recognized as relating wrongly to the Law, the error of dualism is not as widely acknowledged in our Evangelical circles. Simply put, dualism is like split vision, seeing…
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The Presence of the Kingdom
Jacques Ellul offers a profound insight about how we, as Christians, are to adopt as a priority an Incarnational approach to ministry. Incarnational ministry literally means: In the flesh. It means going where people are, and understanding their real situations, rather than primarily trying to draw them to us with various forms of entertainment and…
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