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.
There are times in a person's life and in the life of a nation when everything is changed. Perhaps someone has a new baby. Perhaps a nation suffers a terrible event like 9/11 or a natural disaster. When these kinds of events happen, everything is affected and many things will change. Things have to change because there are new realities that are so in-your-face that to ign...
Keep ReadingAs our culture continues its secularizing journey, we in the church will be faced with more and more quandaries about how to deal with the unbelieving world. Our difficulty comes when we seek to be faithful to Scripture which appears, to skeptics, to have conflicting commands. Before addressing such objections, we remember that our presuppositions about Scripture protect...
Keep ReadingThe other day it occurred to me that spiritual immaturity is like drinking alcohol. Both of these have within them the seeds of self-destruction. Let me explain the connection. Alcohol is a controlling agent. It incapacitates the mind so that a person falls under the sway of unchecked emotions and rationale. Alcohol is like a key that progressively unlocks the chains of ...
Keep ReadingWe have witnessed the gradual demise of Sunday evening ministry. The questions for this article are why has this happened and what should the church's response be. Before getting to the heart of this article, I want to clear away some circumstantial realities in the lives of churches and people. We need to touch on these here so that they don't clutter the main points b...
Keep ReadingThere are two verses in the book of Romans that add support to the concept of Christian hedonism, and help us see it is very different than normal hedonism. In fact, I would say that trying to compare the two is like comparing apples and oranges. For those unfamiliar with the term "Christian hedonism," it was popularized by John Piper a couple decades ago through his pr...
Keep ReadingIt is a mark of pervasive fallenness that even the most spiritual event can be corrupted. Even though Christians have been made new in Christ, we have not been made perfect; and our imperfections can manifest themselves in the most shocking ways at times. In one particular instance, I found that even prayer had succumbed to my fallenness. This is how I saw it play out. ...
Keep ReadingA commonly heard phrase in Evangelical churches is "Hate the sin, love the sinner;" or at least it used to be. But we live in a new day when sin is embraced in ways never before seen in America. Such a phrase only works when the clean distinction between sin and sinner is accepted. In that case, the phrase will freely roll off the tongue. It will continue to do so as lo...
Keep ReadingThere is a question in my mind that haunts me, and I don't like to be haunted. Have you ever been haunted by a thought? There, in the back of your brain it lingers, rising up at unexpected times to torment you with conceptual lashes. There is some overlap with the job of the conscience, but whereas the conscience doesn't let up in its convictional demands for righteousne...
Keep ReadingMany features of God's creation showcase His intentional design. The Woodpecker has a special tongue that wraps around his skull providing a cushion for what would otherwise be a concussion-causing job. The Aye-Aye has incredibly long thin fingers for finding and pulling out grubs through small holes in trees. The Crabeater Seal doesn't actually eat crabs, but has some o...
Keep ReadingSeveral weeks ago our church was looking at a verse of Scripture which seems to unsettle, if not all out destroy, the concept of assurance. Jesus says in Matthew 10:22 "but it is the one who has endured to the end who will be saved." The question of incompatibility goes like this: "How could assurance of eternal life ever be possible if endurance is an evidence of salva...
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