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.
I would like to offer up one more take on how to approach the New Year. This is the time to evaluate, plan and prepare for what you are going to do differently in the coming year. That is usually a good thing to do. Doing it only once a year normally doesn't help much, but once is better than nothing. So what kind of planning and preparing should you do? Well, probably all...
Keep ReadingToday I want to take a different approach in helping make devotional times spiritually valuable. The last three posts have looked at specific features, such as the relational nature of devotional times, the quantity of devotional times, and the quality of devotional times. Today I want to think about what is exactly commanded when it comes to these times. What does God a...
Keep ReadingIn part two, I spoke of devotional times in terms of relationship, namely that there is the need for quality time and the need for quantity time. I first looked at the need for a quantity time. There must be a quantity of time spent in the Bible so that you have a framework upon which times of intimacy with the Lord can even have a possibility of happening. Today I wan...
Keep ReadingLast week I argued that the goal of devotional times was not just to have them, but to revel in them as times of relational intimacy. It is a time for knowing Christ and being known; a time for Christ to dwell in and through you while you rest and grow in Him. Like any relationship, there are two kinds of time spent with a person: quality time and quantity time. They ...
Keep ReadingWhat does it mean to be a Christian? One of the most subtly misguided notions is that a Christian is someone committed to reading the bible, praying, going to church, and maintaining a high moral conduct. If you want an encapsulation of that, you can most easily point to the devotional time. That is the time when a person is reading the bible, praying, thinking about how...
Keep ReadingSo you are one month into 2017, but has your New Year's resolution made it this far? The fact that many resolutions have gone through the wood chipper by now is the very reason people snicker when they talk about these apparent exercises in futility. But for those who know that changes really need to happen, you are in the critical moment. I am told that commanders in t...
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