It’s time for the church to reclaim the biblical mandate of confession. For many Christians, confession is far from our minds. Church often seemingly requires everyone to put on a mask of perfection, hiding all our flaws and shortcomings. We smile politely, put on our best happy face, and push away all the heaviness of
What you set your mind on will become your mindset. We all strive to overcome sin in our lives. One key to winning the battle is confession. Confession brings sin into the light, and sin cannot survive in the light. Rather, it thrives in darkness, where it remains when left unconfessed and hidden. But also,
Romans 7 has been a challenge for some scholars as Paul openly talks about actually struggling with sin. Some have gone so far as to say that Paul must have been speaking of a time before his conversion, or perhaps he was referencing his childhood. Yet, when one plainly reads the text, he doesn’t speak
I did my first Skype interview this week with the National Critics Choice out of Singapore. One of the questions asked was “What do you think the keys to successful Christian leadership are?” Here’s what I’ve since come up with.
I was recently asked the ultimate question: “When you say you follow Jesus, what do you mean?” I spent several days mulling over my response. This is what I came up with.
What is faith?
I’ve grappled with this question over the years. My Dad was a true man of faith. You can read a brief synopsis of his great faith here. So I was raised in a home driven by faith in God.
And yet, while I’ve seen God do some ridiculously amazing things, I’ve also noticed that God doesn’t do everything in the exact way we hope or believe he will, even when we think we’re exercising faith in the proper manner.
My experiences have led me to think about faith…A LOT. So here’s my basic conclusion.
There are ministers and there are performers. And unfortunately, there are some ministers who act more like performers.
I hate unpreparedness. Nothing irks me more than when someone, particularly in a church service, gets up to do something without having prepared. I believe in doing everything with excellence, and when leading, I try not to let anything but the best occur under my watch and supervision. Anything less is inexcusable, although some things inevitably slip through the cracks.
But at the same time, there’s a fine line between excellence and perfection, or between preparedness and performance, particularly in church.
I’ve come to believe that when your goal is perfection, it can easily move from ministry to performance, and those are VERY different things.
John MacArthur recently held a conference called “Strange Fire” to tell as many people as would listen that the Charismatic movement is bad–very, very, very bad (but in a LOT more words than that).
I googled “strange fire” images for this post. Interestingly, I only found images of normal fire. So now the only thing I can ponder is what exactly “strange fire” might look like. Perhaps it looks like little drops of rain? That would certainly be strange. Or maybe it looks like duck-billed platypuses. No, that wouldn’t be strange; that would just be cute. So I’m left all verklempt!
Thanks MacArthur. You’ve ruined my day.
Not only do I think his title is kinda crazy, but I also think his conclusions are significantly flawed. After reading through many of the transcripts from the conference, I completely disagree with MacArthur’s broad, lumping generalizations. They lumped all of us together in sweeping generalizations and demonized the entire Pentecostal and Charismatic movements—literally.
But with that said, in hopes of not adding to the negativity of this whole thing, I pulled a few positive notes from what I’ve read. Here are three observations from MacArthur’s Strange-Fire-whatever-that-looks-like-conference that I think are worthwhile:
I like friends.
When I was a kid, we moved a few times. My biggest concern when trekking into a new town was always making friends. Making new friends can be scary and even awkward. Follow these 5 steps to avoid making a fool of yourself the next time you try to initiate a nice, new friendship.
We all have beliefs, particularly about sin. But what happens when our beliefs about sin become beliefs about people, or worse–about friends? How do we share Truth without looking like cold, uncaring people?
Let’s be hypothetical here, shall we? Let’s say I believe that cleaning an umbrella is wrong. (What, don’t you ever clean your umbrella? No? YOU SICK, SICK PEOPLE!) Anyone who cleans their umbrella is, in fact, “sinning”. So say someone, we’ll call him John, jumps into “sin” and begins cleaning his umbrella every day, even when it’s not dirty.