What makes a church a church? We began to unpack this question at our 5pm Discussion and Prayer meeting Sunday night, April 19. We started with the basics: a church is a gathering of Christians.
But that immediately raised a question for us: do the Christians have to physically meet together to be a church? Could […]
My wife and I love Asian cuisine. My children are in the process of learning to like it. At this point their favorite part of the meal is still probably the fortune cookie. Crack the “cookie” (I use the term generously) and out falls a pithy line about your life, sometimes with a lucky number […]
Read more...On Sunday we studied the command in Hebrews 3:1: “Fix your thoughts on Jesus.” We learned to fight against unfaithfulness and temptation in our hearts by cherishing and treasuring Christ. When our hearts savor the Savior, we find sin’s allurements increasingly weak and hollow.
After the sermon someone asked me, “You often talk about fixing our hearts […]
. . . and I feel fine.” So goes the chorus on R.E.M.’s song by the same title. In some ways those lyrics sum up how I feel about our upcoming presidential election. Because when you watch too much cable news, listen to talk radio, or even some talk among Christians, you can get the idea that […]
Read more...A short Book Review: Let the Nations be Glad by John Piper
If you’ve been in any evangelical church for a length of time you’ve heard about missions. The context may have been attending a few missions conferences, hearing the report of a missionary or a team freshly back from a short term trip, hearing […]
There are three steps in hearing a sermon: understanding it, feeling it and acting on it. If we don’t understand what we hear, we don’t get the message. If we understand without feeling, without being affected, touched or moved, then the Word of God will have little effect on us. We will be hard-hearted.
But if […]
Homiletics. It’s the course in seminary that teaches one how to preach a sermon. Seminarians spend hours in homiletics classes learning the principles of Bible preaching, and then spend years after seminary honing the art through reading, seminars, and most importantly, weekly experience standing at the “sacred desk.”
But what about the rest of the church, those […]
This past week pastors Jeramie, Seth and Chris, and our Director of Ministry Support, Phil Cain, joined five thousdand other pastors, church leaders and seminarians in Louisville, Kentucky at an event called Together 4 the Gospel (T4G). There we heard eight messages on different dimensions of the “Good News”.
We found R.C. Sproul’s sermon ” The Curse motif of the Atonement” and John Piper’s […]
On February 5, 1978, I was a kid living in the warmth of the desert southwest. On that same day Boston was buried in the legendary Blizzard of ‘78. Just ask New Englanders where they were in “the blizzard,” and they will regale you with stories of towering snowdrifts, houses swept away by the storm […]
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