Category: Resources

What Small Churches Can Do – Many smaller churches feel extremely limited by their size, believing that they simply cannot do much of what they would like to do, or believe they should do. 

The Real Reason We Fail To Pray – The real reason we fail to pray isn’t because we’re too busy, too distracted, or too untrained. The real reason we fail to pray is because we’re too confident.

Americans Say Colleges Should Still Fund Student Religious Groups That Restrict Leadership By Their Beliefs and Practices – A dispute over who can lead student religious groups has left Americans uneasy, but few want to see groups punished for requiring their leaders to hold specific beliefs or practices.

13 Needs That Christianity Meets – Why did you become a Christian? For most people, though, the answer is closer to “because it met my needs.” But what needs does Christianity meet?

The Most Important Step In Becoming More Like Jesus Christ – The first step to become more like Christ is to behold his glory in his Word. That’s why it’s so important for us to regularly take in Scripture. For as we read or listen to God’s word we behold Jesus, and the Holy Spirit transforms us into his image.

What I Learned From Pastoring A 106 Year Old Widow – If you have these kinds of elderly folk in your church, consider yourself blessed. If you don’t, I’m sad for you—for there are many lessons to learn from the faithful widows all around us.

89 Year Old Scores Touchdown

Making Disciples In The Everyday Stuff Of Life – I define missional living as being continually-sent disciple-makers who live everyday life with gospel intentionality so we might both show and tell others what worship of Jesus looks like in the everyday stuff of life.

Those Who Think, Read – If we are too busy to think, then we are too busy. And if we are too busy to read, then we are too busy. 

A Guy On The Subway – We’re all coming and going so quickly, eyes ahead, joined only by shared space and the sound of our footsteps.

Ugliness Repels, Beauty Persuades – Three or four years after moving to Switzerland, Francis Schaeffer went through a profound spiritual crisis. What brought on this crisis? Going back many years to his time in college and later in seminary, Francis and Edith were bothered by the lack of love shown between Christians, especially where there was any disagreement.

What Is Our Greatest Need? –  The message of Christianity is not about improving the world, but about changing people in spite of the world, preparing them for the glory that is yet to come. 

12 Ways Millennials Can Serve The Local Church – Young people: church is not about you and your feelings. Church isn’t about personal fulfillment as much as it is about selfless service.

Photobomb!!

So Much Stuff, So Little Time: How Do We Keep Our Possessions from Possessing Us? – Maybe it’s not a matter of denying the appeal of things, but understanding the role of the material in relation to the immaterial. Understanding when things matter and when they don’t.

Why You Should (Literally) Look At The World Upside Down – It’s a figure of speech to look at things “upside down” in order to get some perspective. But what if there’s more here than just a clever turn of phrase? What if we can’t actually see our world in proper perspective unless we’ve seen it upside down?

Aspiring to the Great Commission Is Not Enough: Knowing the Gospel Doesn’t Mean We’re Sharing It – Research shows that Protestant churchgoers in the United States and Canada as a whole are not telling this good news message. According to Paul, part of our new life is that we have been commissioned by God to reconcile the world to Himself through Christ. So we’ve been reconciled to become agents of reconciliation. Unfortunately, most Christians have become cul-de-sacs on the Great Commission highway.

3 Reasons Why You Aren’t Allowed to Be Theologically Dumb – When you love God with your heart but not your mind, you end up loving the god of your imagination, not the God of the universe.

The Glorious Feeling Of Not Mattering – When I feel small, there is the gospel that reminds me that my size and worth is determined by that which was sacrificed for me. When I feel big, there is the gospel that reminds me that I was dead in my sin and transgression, too lost to even know that I was lost.

Discovering The Futility Of My Existence At My High School Reunion – Human existence is a cycle. An endless cycle. The more things change the more they stay the same.

The Story of Ian & Larissa

Are You Weak Enough For God To Use You? – Boast when God lets you fail. Boast when God reduces the size of your army. God isn’t withholding good things from you. In fact, he’s offering you something priceless. As Hudson Taylor said, “God wants you to have something far better than riches and gold, and that is helpless dependence on him.”

10 Ways To Simplify Your Life –  A few practical suggestions for cutting out the things you don’t need.

Only God Is an “End in Itself” (But That’s Not the Whole Story) – Can anything be an “end in itself” in the sense of not serving a purpose higher than itself? Does anything exist in and for itself—from a Christian perspective? I will dare to argue not—except God who is not a “thing” but being and goodness themselves—the perfect telos of all beings, activities and products insofar as they have value at all.

Speculations On Pride – C. S. Lewis was right. Pride is the ultimate sin because it is structured differently from all other sin. Pride is the sin of Satan and makes those who suffer from it most like Satan because it alone rejects the tiny, dirty spark of goodness within all other sin.

Spurgeon Almost Quit – At the age of twenty-two, Charles Spurgeon almost quit the ministry.

Six Ways Millennials Are Educating Their Churches Theologically – Over the past few decades, the seeker-sensitive movement, and before that the church growth movement, taught us much about the importance of contextualization in the church. In recent years, however, I have noticed a remarkable—and welcomed—return by younger leaders to the fundamentals of the faith, basic theological education, and the deepening of doctrinal roots.

Bob Smiley – The Perils Of Parenting

The Formula For Endurance – Endurance is more spiritually important than we sometimes think. In the book of Hebrews, for example, the writer exhorts the suffering and persecuted church over and over again to endure. Remain. Persevere. Stay in the fight until the end. But how do you do that? What’s the formula for endurance? It’s surprisingly simple…

How Does God Define Success? – If success is defined from God’s perspective, where faith in Christ and faithfulness to Him is what matters most, then the men and women of Hebrews 11 not only understood what true success is, they applied that understanding to every aspect of their lives.

Is Driving School Buses Kingdom Business? – When we say that all work matters, do we really mean all work—even driving school buses? Is that really kingdom business?

Happy Fear – For most of us, fear is an emotion we want to avoid, and that we will even pay to avoid. It’s a negative, painful, distressing feeling. And yet, the wisest man in the world, Solomon, said: “Happy is the man who fears always” (Proverbs 28:14). What kind of fear is this that makes a person happy?

Do You Think It Happened Or Not? – The resurrection is the hinge on which all of Christianity turns. It’s the foundation on which everything else rests, the capstone that holds everything else about Christianity together. Which means—crucially—that when Christians assert that Jesus rose from the dead, they are making a historical claim, not a religious one.  

4 Piercing Truths About The Way God Works In The World – If you were to skim Deborah’s song in Judges 5—thinking that you already knew all the details of the story from the previous chapter—you’d miss four piercing truths about the way God does his work in the world. 

It’s Time For The Masters

The Power Of Consistency – When we lead people in the way of discipleship, one of the issues we must deal with is the boring nature of it all. I mean, there’s only so many ways you can “spice up” the habits that characterize consistent growth in Christ.

How To Wake Up – In a sermon on How to Begin Every Day with God, based on the text, “My voice you shall hear in the morning, O Lord; In the morning I will direct it to you, and I will look up” (Psalm 5:3), Matthew Henry gives eight reasons why we should wake up with prayer.

5 Resurrection Realities That Reorient Our Evangelism – Evangelism rises or falls based upon the reality of the resurrection. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, there is no good news to share: sin and death still reign, we worship a dead and decomposing deity, and Christians should be pitied because we are deceived and pathetic. On the other hand, if the resurrection is true, every Christian should be compelled to share this good news liberally and with great joy.

Increasing Humility – A clear indication of maturing in Christ is increasing humility. The closer we draw to Him the more we see our need for Him, because the closer we draw to Him the more we grasp His holiness and our sinfulness.

Some Unlikely Heroes – This is not the first time the garbage men have spread cheer through the Kroner home. It’s been ongoing. Every week, the garbage men show up. Quincy runs to the window, pulls up a chair, and looks through the window. They dump the garbage can, set it down, turn around and wave at Quincy. Sometimes they’ll honk, too.

A Clean House And A Wasted Life – If you do the things God tells you to do, messes will inevitably follow. But take heart: According to the wisest man who ever lived, these messes are not proof of a wasted life, but of a productive one.

Could This Be The Greatest Shot In March Madness History?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3_IT622Sbc

The Redemption Of Boredom – But whether you love chemistry or not, we’ve all been there. For you, maybe it was Shakespeare, or sitting on hold waiting for the cable company to answer your call, or one of those pointless, endless meetings at work that a two paragraph e-mail could have covered. Have you ever noticed how many boring moments there are in life?

Young People’s Greatest Problem Is… – At least, according to Matthew Henry. In his little book, Sober-Mindedness Pressed Upon Young People, Henry says, “I have seen more young people ruined by pride than perhaps by any one lust whatsoever.”

Can Your Congregation Answer The Questions Of A Post-Christian Society? – Christians are often stymied because they simply don’t know how to apply biblical truth to all of life. As a result, they are continually in retreat before competing ideas. The dominant theories in virtually all fields are secular, and sometimes explicitly anti-Christianity. In order to obey the cultural mandate, we need a strategy that empowers us to show where those theories are mistaken, and then to craft positive biblical alternatives.

4 Reasons To Write Down Prayer Requests – As I thought about this a bit more I’ve decided to always write down prayer requests. If you are one of those tech savvy dudes you can use something like OneNote to keep a record of these. I’m not one of the cool kids so I still use pen and paper and stick little notes in my Bible.

C.S. Lewis Said It: God’s “Goodness” Cannot Be Wholly Other – For years now I have been insisting that the main reason I am not a Calvinist (or any kind of divine determinist) is that, taken to its “good and necessary consequences,” Calvinism makes God morally monstrous.

Why Did Christianity Grow? – A few years ago I made my way through one of his best known books, The Rise of Christianity. Stark, in debunking a number of historical myths, tries to explain from a sociological perspective “how the obscure, marginal Jesus movement became the dominant religious force in the western world in a few centuries.”

Tim Hawkins – 8% Body Fat