Tag: 1 John

A Call to Action

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As we continue in our series, A Word on Reality, this past Sunday morning we looked at John’s call to make loving one another something that goes beyond being merely a slogan we claim, to an essential part of our identity in Christ.  Read on for more…

A Call to Action

Have you ever seen or worn a t-shirt with a slogan on it?  I suspect you have.  I had one in high school that my folks recently dug up in one of their closets and mailed to me that read: “The football team will be performing before and after tonight’s featured performance of the marching band halftime show.”  It featured a picture of a trombone slide piercing a football.  Now, if you’re a football fan or player you may be rolling your eyes, but I’m comfortable admitting that I was a huge band nerd in high school.  Also, our football team was awful.  And with over 200 kids in the marching band, for most home games our parents easily made up the biggest percentage of the crowd.  So yes, the crowd really was mostly coming to the game just to see the band.  Read the rest…

Good Little Children

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This past Sunday as we continued our journey in 1 John, A Word on Reality, we looked at both the blessings and the expectations of being called the children of God.  The blessings are incredible beyond our ability to comprehend, but we are at the same time called to live up to a standard consonant with our confession.  What is this standard?  Keep reading to find out.   Read the Rest…

A Vise-Grip on Truth

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This week as we continued in the third part of our series through 1 John, A Word on Reality, we looked at how we can stand firm in the reality of God against this world’s unrelenting tide of fantasies and their ever more aggressive attempts to move in their direction.  If we are going to resist the lies of this world, there is one key thing we must do.  Read on to find out what it is.

 

A Vise-Grip on Truth

For the past couple of summers, Lisa and I have enjoyed the show “Fool Us with Penn and Teller” on the CW Network.  It’s a gameshow wherein four different magicians bring their best tricks to try and fool the world-famous magician duo.  The challenge is that they’ve been at it for over 40 years and know just about everything there is to know about magic and how to do it.  While there are a few tricks we have been able to figure out, there are some that leave us absolutely flummoxed as to how they did it.  Any really good magic trick can leave you feeling like maybe there’s more to this world than we know about.  Now, of course, no magic show is any more than a cleverly disguised trick, but the intimation of something more is part of its appeal.  Still, while the nod and wink of a magician is entertaining, following that rabbit all the way down its hole can lead, as Alice discovered, to more trouble than most of us would care to find.   Read the rest…

Whose Word Is Final?

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In part two of our teaching series, A Word on Reality, we talked about how we can know with assurance that we are close to God by looking at 1 John 2:1-17.  What is the evidence of a life spent in Christ?  Read on for the answer.

 

Whose Word Is Final?

Close your eyes for me for just a minute.  I’m going to say some words and I want you to internally react to them.  Whatever your reaction is, I want you to just dwell on it for a moment and then we’ll talk about it in a bit.  Heaven.  Grace.  Love.  The world.  Sin.  Submission.  Obedience.  Okay, open your eyes.  Now, by a show of hands, how many of you reacted positively to all of those words?  Anyone react negatively to all of them?  How many were split between some of the words?  How many of you reacted positively to the first couple of words and more negatively to the ones after that?  Okay, how about this one: how many of your reactions went from most positive to most negative in the order of the words as I spoke them?  That last word, obedience, leaves a sour taste in the mouths of a lot of people today.  I think part of the reason for this is that we have been fed since birth a worldview by our culture that believes the highest good is achieved when we are singularly in control of our lives.  Now, while there are a few people in the world who have personalities that are very comfortable in a setting where we simply do as we are told, I suspect they are more the exception than the rule.   Read the rest…

A Vibrant Realism

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This Sunday we kicked off a brand new teaching series called, “A Word on Reality.”  For the next few weeks we are going to be working through 1 John and taking a close look at his invitation to be a part of the real world and what it looks like when we do.  In this first part of the series we talked about what needs to happen before any movement in this direction can take place.  Keep reading to find out what this is.

 

A Vibrant Realism

Have you ever tried to teach someone who thought they knew what you were talking about better than you did?  How’d that go?  It was pretty frustrating, wasn’t it?  You probably kept trying to tell them one thing or another, but you could tell they weren’t really listening.  Maybe they were hearing, but not listening.  Then, when you sent them out to put whatever it was into practice they failed.  Miserably.  But then, instead of getting mad at themselves for not being a very good student, they got all upset at you for not teaching them well enough.  The problem was: While they thought they were living within the bounds of reality on whatever the issue was, you knew they weren’t.  But, because of their deeply ingrained false belief, they weren’t willing to listen.  Have you ever been there?   Read the rest…