This blog is Pastor Jay's weekly musings about God's Word, God's world, and God's call to our culture. We hope they encourage, challenge, and inform you. Sign up to recieve them in your email.
Life is hard. Ironically, this is easy to say. And it seems there are seasons of hardness, not only for individuals but also families, marriages, churches and nations. I think we may be seeing some of that in our church. As I looked over the membership of our church, almost every family has a significant challenge facing them. While this is not happening to our church ...
Keep ReadingWe are living in a golden age of resources. The technological revolution has opened up to the common man incredible abilities to search information and use information by way of digital tools. This has never been so accessible or so easy to use. For Christians, this means we can access the writings and work of past Christians more than ever before. This also means that...
Keep ReadingI have discovered the answer to an age old question that many have wrestled with in vain. The question is this: if you had three wishes from a genie in a bottle what would you wish for? Many have tried the approach of "I would ask for infinite wishes", but as we learned in Aladdin, that contingency has been covered by Genie protocol. So what do you do? (Brace for profu...
Keep ReadingLast week the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, in conjunction with many other leading biblical evangelicals, released a document called the Nashville statement. This statement upheld the historic Christian position on the biblical teaching of human sexuality and marriage. You can read it here. This statement, composed of a preamble, 14 affirm/deny articles, and...
Keep ReadingOne of the most difficult things you will have to go through is relational conflict. And one of the reasons it is so difficult is because it is so continual. As long as you are around people, you will be around conflict. So what do we do about this? Most do what comes natural, and it is either retreat or attack. Clearly, turning a cold shoulder or hurling sharp words i...
Keep ReadingWe live in a pornified culture. Sexual sin has become so commonplace that people don't recognize it as the sin that it is. This means Christians, and the church as a whole, need to become very good at speaking to sexual matters in a way that is clear, serious, and unashamed. As a caveat, we must always protect the innocence of young children, not giving them what the...
Keep ReadingPrioritization. I put that word first because, wellyou know. Prioritization is one of those things that we all know we need to do, but we don't because, ironically, it is not a priority. It is just easier to do what is easy (how is that for an earth-shaking observation?). The need, and the difficulty, of prioritization is familiar to us all and is a reality in every ar...
Keep ReadingOne of the most frustrating realities, and at the same time one of the most wonderful realities, is that God is not like us. This is wonderful because if God became moody or capricious, even for a moment, all of reality would be unalterably unhinged. We tend to forget this. And we forget it because we are busy suppressing our angst that God hasn't done what we see as c...
Keep Reading"Never has a man spoken the way this man speaks." This was the stunned assertion of the guards in John 7:46, who were supposed to arrest Jesus, but they just couldn't bring themselves to do it. Jesus was too unique, too powerful, too "otherly." Jesus' words on prayer are like this as well. The insight, encouragement, and compulsion he creates when it comes to prayer i...
Keep ReadingTime flies when yourdoing ministry, apparently. People often talk about how kids grow up before you know it, but it is true of a church as well. It is hard to believe we have been here five years. The mixture of excitement and uncertainty felt in that first year is still vivid. Maybe it is because that mixture of excitement and uncertainty is still around in certain wa...
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