Tag: Growing in Christ

Team Sports

Leave a comment

No one really accomplishes anything on their own. As we go through our journeys, there are all sorts of people who are pouring into us and enabling us to accomplish the things we do. Some of this is formalized and intentional; a great deal of it is unplanned and circumstantial. But all of it shapes and directs where we go and what we accomplish on the way. This is true about life in general. It is even more true about the growth and development of our faith. As we continue our look at how God designed us to be as a church today, we are talking about the second part of our identity: growing. Growing in Christ is never something that happens on its own. Let’s talk about how it actually works, and what that means for us.

Team Sports

On occasion the world discovers an athlete who seems to have gotten really good at some sport entirely on his own. In the 2024 Olympics in Paris, there was a member of the Turkish shooting team named Yusuf Dikec who took the world by storm and was the source of an endless number of memes. In the 10-meter pistol competition, while all his other competitors had expensive headphones and glasses and guns and uniforms, Dikec was just…casual. With his rumpled shirt and shorts, a pair of Dollar Store ear plugs, and his normal, everyday glasses—and his non-shooting hand stuffed casually in his pocket—he calmly won the silver medal. Everyone else absolutely looked the part. Dikec looked like somebody’s dad who had woken up late and just slid into the parking lot in time to make his scheduled slot in the event. His nonchalance instantly became legendary. As much as they made for fun stories and speculation, the truth is a little more complicated than that. 

Read the rest…

Morning Musing: 1 Peter 2:2-3

Leave a comment

“Like newborn infants, desire the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow up into your salvation, if you have tasted that the Lord is good.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We had a hurricane come through our area yesterday. Thankfully, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. Perhaps the single biggest challenge was that the family was stuck at home all day and the Internet kept going in and out. For the kids at least, it was like living in the Dark Ages. Maybe the Stone Age. They had to break out an actual DVD in order to watch something on TV. It was rough. As I was out and about some during the day, though, a thought occurred to me that struck me as worth sharing. Maybe not, but I’ll let you decide.

Continue reading “Morning Musing: 1 Peter 2:2-3” →

Growing Up

Leave a comment

This week we are in the third part of our series, Authentic Church. We have been talking about how we can tell when a church is a real church and not just a club that does some religious things on the side. As we talked about last week, authentic churches are active in proclaiming the Gospel to those who haven’t heard it, in inviting people to get into a relationship with Christ. But once we see someone cross that line, our work isn’t done. We have to help them grow. Let’s talk this week about the next thing that makes a church an authentic church: Growing people in Christ.

Growing Up

When I was in seminary, one of the courses we had to take was about practical ministry. Technically, the course was called “pastoral counseling,” but that basically translated how to be a good pastor in the day-to-day of ministry work. The professor tried to touch on a few different areas that we were going to face in ministry and which all the theology and language study and apologetics courses in the world weren’t going to prepare us for. One of the topics we covered in class was some best practices for how to do a funeral. That sounds kind of morbid, I know, but it’s part of the work, and an important one at that. We learned a variety of things the teacher—who had been a pastor for decades at that point—identified as “do’s” and “don’ts” in class, and those were pretty helpful. I don’t remember any of them in particular now, but I remember thinking this was probably actually going to be useful stuff then. But do you know when I really learned how to do a funeral? When my pastor and mentor took me along and involved me in the funeral of a man in the community who died during that semester. I listened to him, watched him carefully, and when I found myself having to do a service on my own a couple of years later, I just did what he did. 

Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: Hebrews 12:11-13

Leave a comment

“No discipline seems enjoyable at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Therefore, strengthen your tired hands and weakened knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be dislocated but healed instead.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Do you know why most people don’t exercise the way they should? Because they don’t want to. I rushed that, didn’t I? You were getting all of your excuses ready to start listing off in defense of your lack of exercise, and I cut your short. But the truth is, at the end of the day, we don’t exercise as much as we should (and I’ll let you define “should” in a way that makes you comfortable) because there are other things we’d rather do more. We have time for all of the things we most want to do. Period. Of course, the reason we don’t want to exercise as much as we want to do other things is because exercising is hard. We don’t like doing hard things. But sometimes, hard things that hurt us in the moment help us in the long run. This is an important thing to keep in mind in the next part of Hebrews 12 here. Let’s take a look at this together.

Read the rest…

Morning Musing: Hebrews 6:1-3

Leave a comment

“Therefore, let us leave the elementary teaching about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works, faith in God, teaching about ritual washings, laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And we will do this if God permits.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Living things grow. All of them. If there is something that is living, that something is growing. Now, what growth looks like isn’t the same for every living thing. Our oldest has grown something like eight inches in the last eighteen months (we’re taking up a collection for clothes and shoes…). His growth has been hard to miss. I haven’t gained an inch of height in decades (although I have gained a bit about the midsection). My growth looks different from his. But we’re both living and so we’re both growing. As the author of Hebrews begins a section that is perhaps the most infamously uncomfortable of the whole letter, he continues the argument we looked at yesterday that a living faith must be a growing faith. Let’s start here and then next week we’ll continue working through these challenging verses together.

Read the rest…