Tag: Disicpleship

The Gospel Is for Everybody

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This week we are kicking off a brand-new teaching series. God has been doing a pretty incredible work at my church. We are experiencing explosive growth thanks to the movement of His Spirit in our midst. We are also on the cusp of breaking ground on an expansion and renovation of our current facilities. It’s a pretty exciting time, and we are most definitely going somewhere. But in order to make sure we are truly heading in the right direction, we need to remember who God made us to be. For the next three weeks, we are going to be explore afresh the basic elements of our identity as a church. Thanks for coming along for this journey with us.

The Gospel Is for Everybody

Social media can be a great tool for the advancement of the Gospel. But social media can also be a place where people vent their spleen without really thinking through what the full consequences of their words might be. I won’t ask you to raise your hand if you’ve ever posted something you later wish you hadn’t and even perhaps had to take down because of the negative impact it was having. And the thing is, because none of us are particularly disciplined with our words on a good day—whether they are coming from our mouths or our fingers—all of us are susceptible to this kind of thing. Even pastors. 

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Digging in Deeper: 1 Timothy 1:1-2

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“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our savior and of Christ Jesus our hope: To Timothy, my true son in the faith. Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Young people need old people. Sometimes they’re fully conscious of it. Sometimes they’re not, but the need is so pressing they are drawn to them anyway. More specifically, young men need older men and young women need older women. Young people need models and mentors they can look up to for wisdom and direction, for encouragement and even for correction at times. When they find someone like this with whom they connect, the bond that forms can be incredibly strong. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a mid-season review of the HBO-Max series, The Penguin, about the rise of the classic Batman villain. Since then, I’ve finished the series. I don’t often come back to a single season of a series more than once, but this one really stuck with me. Let’s talk about the church, being a mentor, and why The Penguin was both great and terrible.

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Making a Case

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This past Sunday as we continued our series, How to Read the Bible, we talked about why engaging with the Scriptures is something worth your time. When the percentage of American’s who engage with the Scriptures has fallen 10% in the last year, this is something we need to know for ourselves and so that we can share it with others. Read on to discover some reasons this matters so much in your life and in the lives of the people around you.

Making a Case

Have you ever had someone try to convince you to do something you weren’t interested in or perhaps even opposed to doing? Have you tried to do it to someone else? How did that go? Did they succeed in their aim? What kind of an approach did you take? There are many different options available depending on the nature of the relationship between the two of you. In school, something like this often takes the form of basic peer pressure. They could have used the “everybody’s doing it” line. They might have offered a variety of reasons why you should do it. It could be they started mocking you for your unwillingness to join in, calling you any manner of names in the process—”scaredy cat,” “goodie two-shoes,” “weakling,” and so on and so forth. It could have been a pretty girl or handsome guy enticing you toward whatever it was with the promise of more personal attention if you came. There may have even been the threat of physical violence toward you if you didn’t join in. 

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