June 2010
3 posts
The Great White Hope is dead.
Churches in our area that continue to focus primarily on reaching white people are headed for decline in the coming years. In my not so humble opinion, any church who has the white community in San Joaquin County as its primary evangelism target is making a huge mistake, one that I believe will backfire big time in the long run. There are a couple of reasons I make these statements with some...
Commute Groups
I was thinking about the early church worship practices yesterday and got a seed of an idea that I think is kinda cool.
The early church would meet every day early in the morning in secret locations. They’d pray for each other, take communion, and commit to each other to live out the Christian ideals in their work that day. Their meetings were short, private affairs that they did not...
Not my own
I heard a Bible teacher once state that he didn’t believe there is a ‘will of God’ for every person. He said he believed the Bible teaches that as long as you stay within the bounds of Biblical teaching that God’s providence for us is that we do whatever we want and we have his blessing. He stated that in thirty years of ministry that he’d never prayed about a single ministry decision. He seemed...
May 2010
7 posts
"God is in control"
People say this quite a bit and they mean well. I know this because I’ve said it myself a million times over the years and meant it to be comforting and encouraging to someone in a tough spot. The sentiment is true, but really I don’t know that it’s absolutely true in reality. I believe God is sovereign, but he’s not always in control.
Obviously this a theological question...
Journal entry - Trust God
Job 8 - Perfect example of the sexiness of false doctrine. This idea that if you’re good your life will be rosy and you’ll always come out on top appeals to human narcissism and is not based in reality. I suppose if you extend things out beyond death and into eternity then it’s true doctrine. But normally, as here, the idea is that your temporal existence will be comfortable and...
Journal Entry - Emotion and Faith
Journal Entry - Emotion and Faith
Reading: Esther 3-8, Luke 18 Things that made me go hmmmm…. Esther 7….Esther didn’t ask her big request until she had the king all liquored up. What would we say today about a woman who liquored up her husband and asked him to wack her enemy who just happened to be his XO? Devious? I think of one of those James Bond black leather clad femme fatales. But...
Spiritual Leadership
Spiritual leaders discern and obey the will of God. Period. This is their role as spiritual leaders; to listen for God’s instruction and then lead in obedience. Sometimes this instruction is given by virtue of experience, sometimes it’s delineated in Scripture, sometimes it’s found in Godly counsel, and other times it’s given directly to the leader from God. No matter the means, the end is...
Introverted Christians →
“If you hate change you’re going to hate being irrelevant even more.”
– @loswhit
Bless ur enemies
I heard once that a definition of an enemy is someone that has set themselves in opposition against you. Put that way an enemy is much less evil and rare and could be much more friendly and commonplace. Usually when I think of an enemy I think of someone like the lady who lives behind me who throws away my kids toys; hateful, angry, and mean. I think of Nazis, or Pol Pot, or Josef Stalin, or...