Will the real Jesus please stand up?
I really enjoyed this from my friend Laura. If you want a snapshot of what ministry is like in our community, here are four different views of Jesus she managed to encounter in one day. This type of thing is typical here.
The Halloween Night that changed my life
‘Dave made a stand for Christ that night at Virginia Tech. God used him to relay a message to me that altered my life for all eternity. I call Dave every Halloween night and thank him for his stand. I’m a very unlikely candidate for Christianity. I loved my sin. I loved my life. I had a very hard heart. Many people before Dave had tried to have a gospel conversation with me. I didn’t want Jesus. But for some reason, he wanted me.’
If God is not sovereign…
I liked this one from Tim Challies. The sovereignty of God is one of those doctrines that, if we understand it rightly, so much falls into place.
13 ways church can encourage mental health
Here are some simple things you can do as a church leader to help those suffering with mental health issues in your congregation. For more on this, see my book The Pastor With A Thorn In His Side.
HR goes to church
By contrast: ‘The therapeutic mentality will eventually have the effect of making church life answerable to HR, or to something very like HR. For the therapeutic schema, HR is the institutionalization of therapeutic rules and norms; HR exists to insure that everyone is mentally healthy, “well,” etc. (Of course, HR does this not because it is concerned with people in themselves, but because our economic system requires a certain degree of “wellness” so that people can make money for big business and also spend money to keep the economy humming along.) Eventually we end up with pastors in the dock being evaluated and tried by HR consultants.’
Principles for seeing and celebrating Christ in his scriptures
‘My redemptive-historical, Christocentric approach identifies at least seven possible ways of faithfully magnifying Christ in the Old Testament. All seven principles assume that we are reading the Old Testament through the lens of Christ, for only in him are we empowered to see, live, and hope as God intended from the beginning.’
From the archive: If it saves even one life
‘If it saves just one life, has it all been worth it? Many would tell you, ‘yes.’ If only we grasped the value of a soul, they aver, we would see that ploughing on with an utterly fruitless form of evangelism for decades was certainly worth it because, through it, one guy became a Christian. Even though it appears that outreach activity did, indeed, only save one life that has deemed the thousands of man-hours and money pumped in hand over fist entirely worthwhile. How can one argue against that?’