I’m a companion to all who fear you,and to those who keep your precepts. My thoughts today took me onto the subject of companionship and friendship. Who are your friends? Why are you friends with various people? In scripture we have a tension between two views of the relationship between God’s people and those around…
An alien am I on the earth.Don’t hide your commands from me. I frequently teach that there are two elements to the Christian life: Identity and Mission. It’s easy to go off the rails on the side of identity, trying to separate ourselves from the crowd. On the other hand, we can become so much…
That’s a fairly ambitious title I gave myself, but the content is a bit less ambitious. When I found that I’d be teaching from Philippians 2 in Sunday School, I commented that if someone couldn’t teach a class from Philippians 2:5-11, they should just give up teaching. That’s probably a bit harsh, but the passage…
It seems to me that one of the most serious difficulties we have in the church today is the way we measure success. We are driven by numbers and money. It’s easy, of course, to justify this. After all, if you don’t have money, you generally can’t help people. I am reminded of Chapter 3…
I’ve recently said and written a few things about the gospel commission, including my claim in my concluding presentation for my video series on eschatology that eschatology is all about the gospel commission. You’ll hear more about this in my foreword to Dave Black’s new book Running My Race. It’s in the final stages of…
I was talking recently with a friend who commented that there are certain events that serve as anchor points for our faith. For me, despite all the drifting I’ve done since it happened, one of those points was the time when my father was healed. I alluded to this briefly in a comment on the…
One of the most interesting and troubling things I’ve found about myself and my church (any of the churches of which I’ve been a member!) is the number of things we know we should do and even decide we will do, but which never get done. Seven Marks of a New Testament Church is certainly…
I just extracted a post from Dave Black’s blog and put it on The Jesus Paradigm. For those unacquainted with Dave’s blog, I do this so that I can get a permanent link, and I have his permission to do so. Dave asks some important questions. How do our values impact the way that we…
Two paragraphs from Rendering unto Caesar: The most obvious conflict with the fusion of Christian and American identity is that it denies the universal nature of the Kingdom of God. When our allegiances are too strongly aligned with any kingdom of this world, be it the relatively benevolent kingdom of America or a malevolent kingdom…
If you don’t know I own a publishing company (Energion Publications) by now, I’d be pretty surprised. It’s not as though I don’t talk about it regularly. One of the things I find interesting about blogging is to discover which blog posts actually catch people’s attention. There are times when I have put my heart…
