A Secret Life of Prayer Will Prevent a Secret Life of Sin
If I am not being personally alert and bending my heart in prayer then I am probably bounding ahead unaware of trouble.
In other words, (as I believe someone else has said) you go bad in private before you go bad in public. A person cannot be regularly pouring out his heart in praise, confession and petition to the God of heaven with a ton of dirt from his secret life under his fingernails. In fact, in every... Continue Reading
Checking the Pulse of Spiritual Sibling Rivalry
If we’re honest, there are times where we meet a brother or sister in Christ and don’t feel like being a brother or sister in Christ to them.
There is no need to give you a solution in this article or instruct you on how to resolve the issue. That’s not my aim. You’ll see that soon enough. Rather, I want you to check your spiritual pulse and see where sibling rivalry might exist in your heart. You and I need to come... Continue Reading
Destroy a Church in 4 Simple Steps
How do churches go from thriving to dying? How do they slide from healthy to sick to dead?
We did not get that building. That building was sold and, if I understand correctly, will soon be torn down. In the end the denominational leaders charged with selling it did not want the gospel in that building, they wanted money out of that building. They needed the money to help support two more of... Continue Reading
‘Expository Preaching’ – Time for Caution
Clarifying the term ‘expository’ as a model of preaching
Preaching needs to be much more than an agency of instruction. It needs to strike, awaken, and arouse men and women so that they themselves become bright Christians and daily students of Scripture. If the preacher conceives his work primarily in terms of giving instruction, rather than of giving stimulus, the sermon, in most hands,... Continue Reading
Special Needs Children in God’s Kingdom: From the Sidewalk Snapshot to the Big Picture
The Scripture tells us that we are all broken although not all in the same way
But God has placed this broken momma and this broken boy and their broken little family in the midst of a bigger broken, yet redeemed family, God’s Church. More specifically, God had placed them in their local church body. Why should our local church body care about my little boy with his special needs? Well,... Continue Reading
Chicago’s Urban Prep Achieves Another Year of Perfect College Acceptance
For the fifth year in a row, all of its students were accepted into four-year colleges
In Urban Prep tradition, 240 seniors, all African-American males, celebrated their success on Tuesday April 8 at a ceremony where they exchanged their red uniform ties for a red and gold striped tie, a symbol of their new accomplishment. “The tie represents to me moving on from a boy to becoming a young man and... Continue Reading
Obamacare Religious Exemption Hard To Get
In the fine print of the Affordable Care Act is a clause that allows people of certain religions to seek an exemption from the requirement to carry health insurance or pay a fine
It won’t fly with the IRS, the agency that will collect fines from those who were supposed to buy health insurance and didn’t. Why? Because the exempted religions must have been established prior to 1950. That mirrors the exemption clause from a big government program: The Amish in particular neither pay into nor collect from... Continue Reading
Why Homosexuality Is Not Like Other Sins
Homosexuality is not the only sin mentioned in I Corinthians 6:9-10, but it is different from all the rest, at least right now.
Distancing ourselves from both the left and the right, we don’t celebrate homosexual practice, we acknowledge God’s clear revealed word that it is sin; and we don’t hate those who embrace homosexuality, we love them enough to not just collapse under the societal pressure. We speak the truth in love into this confusion, saying, simultaneously, “That’s wrong”... Continue Reading
Wonder
One chief evidence of gospel grace in the life of the believer is wonder
To know this God of grace is to marvel. To know his love is to wonder. “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it” (Psalm 139:6). No we cannot attain it. But by the Spirit of Christ, we do taste and see God’s breathtaking goodness. We enter a sphere... Continue Reading
A Review: ‘The Gospel at Work: How Working for King Jesus Gives Purpose and Meaning to our Jobs’
By knowing who they really work for believers are freed from building their meaning, purpose, and identity on their work
By remembering who we are and whose we are keeps us from falling into the double trap of idolatry and idleness in our occupations. Both of these grow out of the same misconception: if we are seeking our value and worth in our profession then we will (1) either turn it into an idol –... Continue Reading