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This week President Barack Obama came out and endorsed gay marriage. This has gotten a lot of passionate response from Christians everywhere. While I wish President Obama didn’t feel the way he did, I also am not worried or concerned about the president’s views or the state of marriage in our country. If you were to only listen to peoples’ responses or only read your facebook timeline, you might be tempted to think that God was caught off guard this week, but he wasn’t. As you work through your thoughts and emotions about homosexuality keep a few things in mind.
God does not hate homosexuality more than he hates your lying tongue or the way you stir up conflict.That’s the funny thing about God, he doesn’t rank sins like you and I. The Bible does tell us that sexual sins are sins against our body, but it doesn’t rank sins as worse than others. It does tell us however a few things that God hates, and oddly enough homosexuality isn’t on the list.
...read moreThere are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who
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As church leaders we are all trying to find ways to make our presentation of the gospel more effective. While there are many different ways to structure a worship service, the tips I give in this article are specifically geared towards churches who are trying to use their Sunday service to reach lost people. If your target audience on a Sunday is sinners there may be a few tweaks you can make to make your service better. Most of the suggestions might be contrary to what you think a worship service should be if you were raised in a church where the Sunday service was open to sinners but primarily structured for Christians.
1. Shorten your service
Chances are your services are too long. You probably don’t feel like they are because you have stories about services you grew up in that went 3 or 4 hours, but your guest hasn’t been to church in 15 years, and he’s giving it a try because his friend leveraged all of his relational collateral to get him there. Who said that church services had to be long anyway? Where did we come up with that unwritten rule? A few weeks ago we had a lady visit our church, and after the service was over she came up to me, shook my hand, and asked me
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Needless to say, there is a lot about church planting I didn't know when my wife Jennifer and I started preparations to plant Discover Life Church. We both grew up in a Pastor's home and had successfully led youth ministries together for 8 years, but there was so much about this new endeavor that we weren't prepared for. I don't believe it was because we didn't pray enough and it certainly wasn't for a lack of input from others. There are just some things in life that you have to learn as you go through them. I am finding that God often times doesn't let us see the whole picture. If we knew when we started what we know now, we might never have obeyed His calling or trusted His leading. Here are five things I know now, three years into this amazing journey...
#1. I DIDN'T KNOW IT WOULD BE SO HARD... to build an effective team of people.
About three months after our launch, I called a mentor of mine to shoot the breeze one day and he asked me a troubling question, "Have you lost your leadership yet?" I responded in confidence, "No we have been the lucky ones!" Little did I know that over the next six months, God would clean house of my first wave of leaders and
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“When was the last time we laughed like that as a family?” I asked myself as we were on our way to a small family get away during spring break. The church calendar had been non-stop from Thanksgiving to Easter Sunday; the kid’s sports program had us running every night of the week from basketball to volleyball to gymnastics. It seemed as if there were not enough hours in the day or enough days in the week. We were always exhausted. Family dinners were infrequent because of the differences in our schedules. We rarely saw each other. We were like ships passing in the night.
One night after an exhausting day my wife and I were lying in bed and we realized that the hectic pace of our calendar was taking its toll not only on us, but it was clearly taking its toll on our children. Living in a pastor’s home is a challenge and oftentimes pastor’s kids bear the weight of the responsibility just as much as their parents.
I am sure if you are in ministry and you are reading this you have felt the same way I did. The difficult pace of ministry can have a negative effect on several areas of your life. It affects your health, your marriage, and it affects your family. So that night we
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I’m not gonna lie, when I’m doing my reading plan, I tend to skim through Leviticus & Numbers. So, as I was skimming the other day something caught my eye, because it happened more than once. Just to catch you up on the story, Moses and the children of Israel haven’t been out in the desert that long. God has just given His law and the people are still digesting everything that God has instructed. On 2 different occasions something happens with the people and they’re not sure what to do.
Numbers 15:32-35
While the Israelites were in the wilderness, a man was found gathering wood on the Sabbath day. Those who found him gathering wood brought him to Moses and Aaron and the whole assembly, and they kept him in custody, because it was not clear what should be done to him.
God had just given the laws concerning the Passover and it happened again…
...read moreNumbers 9:6-8
But some of them could not celebrate the Passover on that day because they were ceremonially unclean on account of a dead body. So they came to Moses and Aaron that same day and said to Moses, "We have become unclean because of a dead body, but why should we be kept from presenting the Lord's offering with the
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