As a leader in your congregation you may be asked from time to time to offer up a public prayer. (Remember, pastors are not the only ones who can pray.) It can be a nerve-racking experience. One of my anxieties as a beginning pastor was praying publicly. I remember as a freshly minted minister being asked to say the prayer […]
People love sports. People relish the thrill of victory. Winner! People love games. Board games continue to be popular. Card games haven’t gone away. Some people love video gaming to the point of addiction. Competition! I win; you lose. You win; I lose. While competition may have its place as a play thing, it is a dangerous toy. Competition compares […]
What does it mean to “love your neighbor as yourself?” What in our love for self should shape our love for others? At least one of the ways we love ourselves is that we give ourselves a lot of slack. We put the best construction on our own actions. We easily let ourselves off the hook. We self-assess our lives […]
I read two, but only needed to read one, books by Frank Peretti. One was plenty. I mean this is a good sense. In his book, This Present Darkness, he gave a great picture of demonic oppression. He personalized how certain demons plague the people of God. The idea was clear in the first book. I do not suppose that […]
Make no mistake, you are at war. Make no mistake. Don’t let the mundane activities of the moment, the din of daily news, the tedious tasks of the week fool you. You are at war. Satan and his hounds of hell hate what you are doing and the One you serve. They exert their eternal energies to discourage, disrupt and […]
“I tell you the truth,” is a happy translation for the word “amen.” “Truly, truly,” is pretty good too. Doesn’t it always sound nice to hear Jesus start a statement by, “I tell you the truth…?” He rightly identified himself as the way, the TRUTH and the life. As you know, truth has taken a beating. People are not even […]
Money. Sex. Power. Power is the biggest temptation. Power is powerful. The Greek word for power is the word that gives us the English word “dynamite.” You know the old line, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” What you may not know is that the misuse of power is at the base of much of the misuse of money […]
Sex is a gift from God to be enjoyed by a husband and wife. It is indeed a powerful gift. Like all gifts Satan seeks to get us to misuse and misappropriate it. While boundaries are important in all areas of life, they are even more so in the area of intimacy. What follows may sound quaint, outmoded or unenlightened. […]
What follows is not the same as what I have written on tithing. It is the first of three big topics. Money is liquid creation. Money allows you to acquire or access parts of creation. Money like all of creation is a gift from God. We are to use it. Wisely. We should love God and use money. Too often […]
Not only is the Church incurably congregational, it is also incurably “synodical.” Okay, that sounds odd. Synodical? That sounds like a made up word. Actually, it is an ancient word, at least the root word is: synod. Synod means walking on the same (syn—think symphony, lots of sounds at the same time) road (od—think Odyseus and his travels). The word […]