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Creative Ways to Spend Time With God
We can all agree that spending time with God should be a high priority. And yet, we often have a set image of what a devotional life is and what it looks like. In our minds, having quiet time with God looks like waking up early to sit somewhere, read the Bible, and pray without interruptions. This is one way a devotional time can look, but today I want to explore creative ways of spending time with God that carry meaning while being outside of the box. Writing Letters to God Think about this as becoming pen pals with God. One of my favorite ways to pray is to write…
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How God Speaks Through the Bible and What It Actually Feels Like
We’ve all been told that one of the best ways to hear the voice of God is through His Word. But how, exactly, does this work? What does it look like? After all, opening the Bible to a random page and pointing at a verse can land you in some pretty bizarre places. If you are seeking to hear God’s voice, opening your Bible to “you shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk” won’t be too helpful for your current situation. (Unless you wanted to know the proper way of cooking goat according to the Law of Moses…) Today, we will dive into what hearing God through…
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You Have What It Takes to Make Disciples
The end goal of evangelism is to make disciples. When evangelism only gets converts without discipling them, just part of the Great Commission is being fulfilled. Jesus said, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations… teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20) Evangelism is essential for the expansion of God’s kingdom and the establishing of Heaven on Earth. But converts who don’t know how to be Jesus followers will be weak and ineffective Christians. This is where discipleship comes in. Many people believe that evangelism is the job of big personality evangelists, and discipleship is the job of men or women pastoring a local church.…
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Five Simple Ways to Spend Time With Jesus Throughout Your Busy Week
If you’ve been a Christian for any amount of time, you’ve heard about the importance of spending time with God and developing a devotional life. And yet, for many, this seems like a daunting task. I’ve met many people who struggle to start developing the habit of spending time with God because it seems like a huge, time consuming commitment. Spending time with God is a commitment, and it is important, but it also doesn’t have to be an overwhelming prospect. I believe that if we take small steps, we will make progress whereas if we try to make big leaps out of the blue we will only land flat…
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Grow Closer to God Through Wonder and the Redeemed Imagination
Why is it that the older we grow, the more we lose our sense of wonder? Time and again, I’ve asked myself why imagination is viewed as childlike and cynicism as a sign of maturity. But let’s not forget that wonder and imagination are the reason we have airplanes, the Eiffel Tower and Ratatouille (the movie, although the food looks great as well). Wonder is a quality that Jesus highly values. He even told His disciples that unless they became like children, they wouldn’t enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:3). I believe He wasn’t saying disciples must be immature; rather, they should have the same trust, faith and open-mindedness…
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Owning My Place in Church with Integrity
To finish our January series, “Stronger Me, Stronger Church”, I want to talk about a fundamental part of church life: integrity. Integrity could be described as wholeness of character. It is being who you say you are at all times, regardless of whether you are being watched or not. Merriam Webster defines integrity as firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values: incorruptibility. Being a person of integrity means that your yes is a yes and your no is a no, regardless of circumstances. Jesus put it this way: “But let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ For whatever is more than these is from the evil one.”…
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Learning to Receive Feedback and Offer Forgiveness
Welcome to part three of the mini series “Stronger Me, Stronger Church”. Today we will talk about feedback. Some months back I heard of a consulting group that visited organizations and taught people to give better feedback. After years, they noticed that while it helped, it wasn’t fully successful. So they shifted their approach, and began teaching people not to give better feedback, but how to better receive feedback. They saw more positive changes in the organizations they helped when they created this shift. I want to say that in this article I talk about feedback that is given with a mostly well-intentioned heart and in a relatively healthy environment.…
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What Are You Expecting From Your Church?
Aligning My Expectations People walk into a church for various reasons. Some are seeking answers, truth, hope, or healing. Others are there out of curiosity, habit, or religious duty. A few walk in desperately hungry for God. However a person may come, most of them have one thing in common: expectations. When people cross that door, they come with an idea of what church should look like or be. This works until they’ve been crossing that door for years. No matter what their expectations were at first, later on they will dictate whether they are thriving church members, or bitter and critical seat warmers. The Importance of Aligning Our Expectations…
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The Turning of the Soil: When God Disrupts to Prepare
What do you do when life turns topsy-turvy? While talking with some friends in my small group, we realized that most of us are currently experiencing a stretching in our relationship with the Lord and our daily lives. We’ve all been feeling this odd tension, where things that used to be perfectly fine are no longer working quite the same. There’s this feeling of discomfort, that the places where we felt steady and established are suddenly not so deep rooted as we thought and there’s this nudging in our hearts that Holy Spirit is calling us higher. As I reflected upon this, I realized that this is what God does…
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The Roadmap to the Christian Life and the Warning of Spiritual Amnesia
Last weekend I led a Bible study through the first part of 2 Peter. We spent time digging into Peter’s last words to the church and, as we read, two things that kept being highlighted were Peter’s roadmap to Christian maturity and his warning on spiritual amnesia. Here’s the deal: Peter was about to die and he knew it. Which is why he had to encourage the church, leaving them a solid roadmap to the Christian life, and warn them about spiritual blindness and false teachers/prophets infiltrating the church. Today I want to share both of these vital things with you. Let’s begin with Peter’s roadmap to Christian maturity. Roadmap…
