May I get very personal? The pressures of our times have many of us pastors caught in the web of the most acceptable yet energy-draining sin in the Christian family: worry.
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When I was younger, I had the privilege to get to know the great evangelist, Billy Graham. And when he asked me to help him with illustrations in his sermons, I felt like I’d been enrolled in the finest evangelistic university on Earth. No one did it better than Billy.
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Sin has a ripple effect in families. Even in pastor’s families. Propensity to prolong one particular sin might be handed from father to son genetically. One day science may prove or disprove this notion.
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“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” It’s hard to imagine how controversial that one little command would have been when Jesus first spoke it. We saw in a previous post that the Jews in the first century had twisted God’s Word to justify their hatred for the gentiles—even to the point of letting gentiles drown instead of helping them.
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We can’t fully understand God’s holiness. But we can understand it much better than we currently do. By and large, the typical evangelical’s understanding of God is pathetically superficial. Too many professing believers think about God in only self-centered and self-indulgent terms, reducing Him to little more than a genie in a lamp. Others are preoccupied with a relational perspective on God. They want Him to be more comfortable and ...
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God is never becoming—never growing, learning, or increasing in anything. From eternity past to eternity future, He is always being who He has always been. His infinite perfections cannot be improved upon. It’s hard for us to comprehend the difference between being and becoming. God’s moral perfection and sinlessness is fixed and immutable. In that regard, His holiness is nothing like the holiness of the saints. We who believe are being conformed to ...
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What defines a godly man? That’s an important question, considering the kaleidoscope of people today who claim to represent and speak on behalf of God. We’ve all seen enough frauds to know that self-definition proves nothing. So how can we discern those who are God’s true ministers and shepherds? We need to appeal to a higher standard in order to know the defining characteristics of a true man of God.
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Churches suffer when pastoral search committees are informed more by the corporate world than by the Word of God. Preferences concerning style, personality, appearance, speaking ability, management skills, and sense of humor often factor too heavily in the decision-making process, obscuring clear instructions from God’s Word about the qualifications for church leaders. The tragic result is often that the church can’t tell the difference between unqualified hirelings and true shepherds.
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America’s church culture suffers from an abundance of unqualified church leaders. What’s worse, many of these mavericks preside over a form of church government incapable of restraining or disciplining them.
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Babies crave milk, and only milk. Parents care about the color of the blanket, the pattern of the curtains, the decorations in and around the crib, and the way the child is dressed. The baby doesn’t care about any of that. Babies don’t scream because they’re offended by the color of their pajamas. They scream because they want milk. The only thing that matters to them is milk—from the moment they’re born, ...
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