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.
It is a wonderful providence for us that Thanksgiving comes before Christmas. There are few things we need more during the holiday season. We need the clear view that what we have has come from outside of us and therefore thanks must be raised to the Lord. But even here we can go wrong. Thankfulness can become a pathway of deceiving ourselves. What do I mean? Thankfulnes...
Keep ReadingEveryone has to deal with fear about something at some point in their lives. Yes, there are those people out there that are super talented, highly connected and powerful, and gifted with all kinds of resources; and it can seem that they fear nothing. But if you dig long enough and deep enough, Eureka!, you will strike fear. The source and cause of the fear is irrelevant at...
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 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...
Keep ReadingOne of the realities of raising young children is that you begin to be asked a lot of "why" questions. Why do we brush our teeth? Why do we pray before we eat? Why do we have to go to bed? The benefit to this is you find yourself having to justify things you perhaps have not thought through in a long time. That is a good thing. Useless your response is to rely unthinking...
Keep ReadingIrony has a special place in my heart. I think it has to do with the way truth gets displayed in spite of people's deceptive or idiotic ways. For example, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown hand-wrote a letter of condolence to a mother whose son had died in Afghanistan, but unfortunately he misspelled the deceased's surname. A newspaper published a blistering articl...
Keep ReadingCemeteries are creepy. I lived across from one growing up and much of the time it was just a normal part of our scenery. This cemetery was a part of the church we went to so we often walked to church using the road that went through the cemetery. That wasn't a problem, most of the time. But we also went to church Sunday evenings. When fall rolled around, and darkness rus...
Keep ReadingI am regularly amazed, and that amazes me. One thing that regularly amazes me is the seemingly limitless variety of animals and plants. Now, I am not special in my appreciation of animals and plants. But I really do relish the stunning abilities, habits, organization, colors, shapes, and intricacies of both animals and plants. And I, amazingly so, find myself regularly s...
Keep ReadingThere is a short story called Harrison Bergeron that I remember reading in high school. The plot is set in future America where there is total equality in every area of existence. Beautiful people must wear ugly masks, strong people must be weighed down by weights, and intelligent people must wear ear pieces that blast sounds in order to break their concentration. This ...
Keep ReadingThis post is a portion from an "Ask Pastor John" podcast where John Piper speaks to the issue of righteous, godly anger. In a previous blog that you can read here, I tried to think through the dangers of anger and how to manage it. To bring in more balance, this list from Piper is exceptionally insightful about the place that godly anger should have in our lives. We are ...
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