Charles and Susannah Spurgeon represent another strong marriage from church history, though she had a “very poor first impression” of the great Baptist preacher, Haykin said. The Spurgeons met when he preached for the first time at the London church that came to be known as the Metropolitan Tabernacle. “He was sweating profusely … and... Continue Reading

Confronting a church member. “She was bitter and gossiped all the time. No one else had the courage to confront her, so I had to do the dirty work. It was not a pretty situation, and I’m still suffering from the confrontation today.” In a recent post, I shared the results of an informal Twitter... Continue Reading

Too many of us are so concerned about our problems right now in this life that we’ve not thought about where we will be someday later after death. We’ve got things exactly backwards. We think there is only one path for me to follow on earth, but many paths I can take to get to... Continue Reading

“One of the reasons you have to rebuke one person in the church is because they are hurting the sheep. They’re hurting other people and out of love and the up-building of the other people, you may have to get tough with a sheep-hurter or destroyer or a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”   Answering a... Continue Reading

“Bucer speaks of “counsel and help,” “proper binding up and healing.”  Similar to the third task, we see the need arising from the spreading effect of sin in a sheep. Sin weakens. Sin dulls our affections. We know this, not first by observing our sheep, but by observing ourselves! We stumble. We find ourselves sin-wounded. We need a... Continue Reading

He wants us to give up on prayer. He points out unanswered prayer, reminding us that God has at times not heard us in the past. Why would we then seek God’s presence and power today? He wants us to get puffed up with ego. In fact, this strategy is the root of the rest... Continue Reading

“Missional” [has] become an ecclesiological junk drawer. If somebody wants more social justice in his or her church, that’s missional. If someone wants to be contextually relevant, that’s missional. A lot of times missional is the desired change if someone wants to be something else. Missional is, at its simplest, us joining Jesus on his... Continue Reading

  Jesus wants us to pursue Him, to ask of Him. Even though He knows our needs, even though the thoughts and intentions of our hearts are not hidden to Him, we must ask, seek, knock. We do not have because we do not ask, James tells us. Jesus desires that we come before Him... Continue Reading

If you hate somebody, it’s like a boomerang that misses its target and comes back and hits you in the head. The one who hates is the one who hurts. I talked to girls at a school in Palos Verdes and I said, “If you want to age quickly, then hate somebody.” After that, I... Continue Reading

Have I told you about my conversation with my friend Dan? I said to him, if ‘not yet’ is the last thing we say, and people always remember the last thing, isn’t that discouraging, that it’s always ‘not yet’? Why don’t we say ‘still already’ at the end? But Dan said, why not ‘still already... Continue Reading