Tag: The Church

A Vital Ministry

37 Comments

Every authentic church is built on Christ and Christ alone. Nothing else will do. But that’s not the only thing that makes a church a real church. If we are founded on Jesus, then it would make sense that we would be committed to the kinds of things to which He was committed. Well, there was one thing He was committed to above just about everything else: Getting people into a right relationship with God. Churches who are authentic churches share this passionate commitment. In this second part of our series, Authentic Church, we are talking about this commitment, why it’s there, and what it might look like.

A Vital Ministry

The U.S. Presidency is an incredibly powerful position. For starters, the President is the commander and chief of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen, and it’s not close. Then there’s the power to veto or sign legislation. That means the President gives the final thumbs up or thumbs down on the laws that govern our nation. And because I know there are constitutional scholars somewhere whose ears are tingling, yes, Congress can override a Presidential veto, and the Supreme Court can declare a particular law unconstitutional, but historically speaking that hasn’t happened very often when a President has signed or refused to sign a particular bill, turning it into a law. A bill is just a bill until it is signed by the President. That’s a lot of power. 

Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: 1 Peter 3:18

97 Comments

“For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What is it that draws someone to the Gospel? A whole number of different things. Some are pretty good reasons. Others aren’t quite so good or reasonable, but thankfully the destination is ultimately more important than the path as long as you do indeed wind up in the right place. One of the most powerful draws to the Gospel historically has been the promise of God’s love as expressed through the substitutionarily sacrificial death of His Son, Jesus. This assurance that God values your life even more highly than His own is a pretty potent one indeed. As the apostle Peter put there, Jesus was willing to lay down His life in order to make it possible for you to get to God. The latest entry in what has become one of the most Gospel-soaked film franchises in recent memory offered up a picture of what this is like in one of the most powerful recruitment scenes I think I’ve ever seen. Let’s talk for just a few minutes today about the most recent adventure for super spy Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning.

Read the rest…

Built on Christ

134 Comments

Today we are kicking off a brand-new teaching series. For the next few weeks, we are going to be talking about the church. More specifically, we are going to be talking about just what exactly it is that makes an authentic church. How do we know when a church is really the body of Christ instead of something more like a social club that does some religious activities on the side? While there’s not necessarily a hard and fast rule to help us here, there are some things the Scriptures point to that are pretty good indicators in the right direction. The first one that we’ll talk about today is just exactly what the church’s foundation is.

Built on Christ

Have you ever crossed a picket line? That’s an interesting experience. I’ve done it twice. The first time was when I was pretty little. A new grocery store chain came to town that was not unionized and the union-backed employees of the major chain that had pretty much had a monopoly on the town before the new guys moved in picketed out front of their location around the corner from my house for what seemed like weeks. I’m not sure they ever really accomplished anything. The truth was, most people didn’t care. We certainly didn’t. They were closer and cheaper than the other grocery store, so off we went. I did feel a little bad for the picketers when it started getting cold outside as we drove right past them to get our groceries. Otherwise, though, I mostly just ignored it. 

Read the rest…

Contagious Holiness

2 Comments

So, Jesus rose from the dead. What does this mean for us? Let’s reflect on that today with a story about Jesus’ calling the last part anyone ever imagined He would to be His disciple, and the party that happened afterward. Along the way, we’ll get a good reminder about just what our job is now that Jesus is alive.

Contagious Holiness

A story for you this morning. We typically define our world by what we can see. It may not always seem that way today because we spend so much time as a culture thinking about things we can’t see, but for most people in most situations, what we can see has a great deal to do with how we think about and interact with the world around us. Before the invention of the microscope, this was most definitely the case. In the 1860s, most people generally couldn’t imagine a world smaller than what their eyes could perceive. Then a French chemist and microbiologist named Louis Pasteur did some experiments that proved the existence of these tiny creatures called microorganisms that were apparently everywhere. Not only did some of these organisms do helpful things like allowing for the production of bread or cheese, but they were also responsible for less helpful things like spoiling food and making us sick. What scientists soon figured out was that passing these tiny organisms from person to person may be responsible for one person’s illness getting passed to another person. 

Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: Acts 10:36

Leave a comment

“He sent the message to the Israelites, proclaiming the good news of peace through Jesus Christ – he is Lord of all.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

While I have ours down pretty well, I don’t really understand the governing system of any other nation very well. From what little I do understand, though, in nations like England, while they have regular elections, they can also have snap elections. This is where the Prime Minister declares that it’s time to have an election. This could be for his own position or the various positions of Parliament. When this happens, the whole “election season” lasts for only about six weeks. Then everything goes back to normal. There are times something like that sounds pretty nice, especially when we have been slowly lumbering toward a presidential election season this coming November for months and it’s still only January. There are ten more months of campaigning ahead of us during which time things are probably only going to get uglier and uglier with national tensions rising more and more along the way. And, in the end, if things stay on the course they have been riding this whole time, we are going to wind up with an essentially binary choice between two options that at least by survey, most of the country doesn’t want either of. What fun. With the first round of primary voting officially behind us this week, I thought we would reflect together for a few minutes today on this whole scene and how we should be thinking about it. Let’s talk some politics.

Read the rest…