Stopping to Think

I preached a sermon similar to this at our church last month, and plan on using these notes tomorrow. Thought they might be useful to someone. (Okay really, it's just that if they are here I can't lose them!) The Nature of Christianity Our topic this morning is Christianity. This may seem something of a broad and obvious topic for church service. But I think for us to understand properly how we as Christians are to live, we must first understand what really the nature of Christianity is. The reason this is of fundamental importance is that what you believe defines who you are. You will always-always-act in accordance with what you truly believe. And so if we miss the boat on the meaning of Christianity, we are in big trouble. And quite frankly, I believe most of what we might call current Evangelical teaching has most certainly missed the boat. So, with that being said, I want to give you three things right out of the gate that Christianity is not about. These three are

This is a series of snippets from previous posts.  I have a tendency to clutter pages with many words, so I tried to sift through and pick out a few that I thought might be helpful. The first thing we need to know…is that ultimately, the glory of God is the primary reason our focus is to be on the Gospel. We see this in verses 5 and 6[of Romans 1]. We have received grace and apostleship to bring about obedience through faith for the sake of His name among the nations. Nations including us, right here, right now. All ministry, all personal growth, all faith, obedience, and work are meant not to somehow earn God’s favor, which Ephesians 2 makes very clear is a gift that we cannot earn. It is meant to display the glory, the weightiness, the importance, and the worthiness of Almighty God to the nations. -The Import of the Gospel in Youth Ministry God's glory is the Big Deal. I am saved, the Gospel exists, and God redeems sinners for the sake of His name among all the nations.

We use the term Christian But what does it mean Do I trust in the Gospel Or some man made dream Do I cling to my Lord For His help every hour Is my fath in His promise To be a strong tower Do I abandon myself Lay my life at His feet Or do I chase after pleasure And my own comfort seek For whom do I live Is the question today Do I serve my own self Or do my Lord I obey Do I have a grand vision For living this life Or am I caught up In just avoiding much strife You see to be Christian Has this as it's goal To live for God's glory For there joy is made whole

Disregard the milk seeds, I simply felt like rhyming. Just a quick thought on the value of thought and/or meditation and/or wrestling to understand. I want to break my thoughts into to groups of reading, first Bibles, and second, everything else. This post will only cover #1. And perhaps not even that. So, Bibles. Consider this my critique of paraphrastic "translations" (eg, the New Living Translation), and/or straight up paraphrases (eg, The Message). Before I go too far I do want to be up front and say that part of my frustration with paraphrases is that it can be very frustrating when you know a passage to tun there and find words all out of place or changed. And that frustration can be found even among more literal translations, simply because there are a lot of words that can be translated more than one way. It simply is more common in a paraphrase. Also, I do not claim to be any expert on translations, most particularly because I do not read, write, or speak any of th

Last night over in Harrison, I had the privilege of listening to Wayne Eve speak on Christian "posers." That is to say, those people who are so called "nominal Christians." He went over what a poser looks like, and contasted that with what God has actually called us to.  And as I lay in bed last night afterward, I couldn't get the topic out of my mind, and my thoughts were churning relelntlesy.  I had to get up and open the Word, and God pointed me to Hebrews 10, and what I saw there is what I'm going to write. You see, in Scripture there isn't anyone who could be called a "nominal" Christian. The term really is an oxymoron. Claiming the name of Christ without a willingness to lay aside all earthly things is of no lasting value. Romans 10:9 says that if you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart you will be saved. It sounds so incredibly easy. But then if you turn back to John 3:36 you will see the unmistakable link between belief