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.
The riots are again breaking out across the country. Protesters, angry about racial disparities, are making their voices heard. While many are peacefully gathering, others are not. What is to be done? I heard it again yesterday: Love is the answer. Is it though? Let's try that type of answer to other problems. I have transportation problems. Wheels are the answer. I h...
Keep ReadingIn the last blog post I laid the foundation for biblical love and the impossibly to do it as an unregenerate person. The first and second great commandments are the heart of the issue and I worked off of those to put together a definition of love. That definition was as follows: Love is the worship and obedience to God that overflows in joyfully and sacrificially doing ...
Keep ReadingDespite all the love songs and love stories and love poems that have filled our culture, the culture is still no closer to knowing what love actually is. You can't change blindness by talking about seeing. The aforementioned songs, stories, and poems have only hardened people into a kind of love that is not actually true and glorious love. Self-seeking human nature stays...
Keep ReadingImagine you were at the doctor's office for a physical. When everything was done the Doctor came in, sat down and said, "I have bad news and good news. You have a serious disease. But I know what to do. I have done this surgery thousands of times. I have scheduled the surgery and we are going to get this taken care of. I am glad you came in. Have a great day." You sit...
Keep ReadingDon't you get tired of the swinging pendulum? It seems that everywhere you turn you find some out-in-left-field teaching, and before you know it there is a reactionary swing to the other side that creates its own rat's nest of problems. This very thing has happened with the concept of love. We shouldn't be surprised. Love is an essential biblical teaching, a key att...
Keep ReadingGod's love is one of the most common themes in many churches. Nothing wrong with that. It is clearly a major theme in Scripture. But just because we have lined up with Scripture's emphasis on God's love, doesn't mean we are lining up with Scripture's description of God's love. People make God's love into a divine version of whatever the culture is peddling; something...
Keep ReadingDo you want to improve your marriage? How about your relationship with parents, children, co-workers and neighbors? Communication is not the key. I repeat; communication is not the key. You know this. You are probably communicating all the time with anger, complaints and a host of icy body language. The issue most certainly isn't communication alone, it is the kind of ...
Keep ReadingWe live in a pornified culture. Sexual sin has become so commonplace that people don't recognize it as the sin that it is. This means Christians, and the church as a whole, need to become very good at speaking to sexual matters in a way that is clear, serious, and unashamed. As a caveat, we must always protect the innocence of young children, not giving them what the...
Keep ReadingWe frequently need to be reminded what real love is all about. The world, with its countless "love" songs, rom-coms, romance novels, and various made-for-TV relationships, does not help us in this regard. In fact, it deceives us and turns us in the wrong direction. "We know love by this, that He laid down his life for us" is what the Scripture tells us in 1 John 3:16. Sc...
Keep ReadingAre you a loving person? Your answer can help you determine your level of spiritual maturity. Christians are to be known by our love (John 13:35), and only those who love abide in the light (1 John 2:10). The attributes of biblical love listed in 1 Corinthians 13 are helpful. However, love is like an ocean with various currents constantly moving the waters. Some currents...
Keep ReadingSome things were just meant to be together: Captain Kirk and Spock, meat and barbeque sauce, government and taxes. Some things, however, must be together by necessity. There is nothing about chocolate that requires peanut butter to exist. But men must have women and women must have men. We have heard it lamented before, "can't live with 'em; can't live without 'em." With...
Keep ReadingPeople. Oh, the complexities that come with people. There are so many personalities, so many backgrounds, so many ways we sin against one another. Challenges and perils aside, God calls us to love people and pour out our lives for them. So let's say you want to do better at loving people. You know this is the second greatest commandment, so it isn't effort that will be ...
Keep ReadingFirst of all, many will be pleased to know that this isn't even a book, but a booklet, totaling only 16 pages. Those 16 pages focus on one message: God's love is not well represented by such a vague, weak word that is weighed down with unbiblical notions, and instead should be tied to biblical language that makes it the glorious thing it is. The author, David Powlison, ...
Keep ReadingThe right tool for the right job; that's the professional's mode of operation. Even in the area of demolition, If you are going to do it effectively, you need the right tools. So today I am asking, what would be a good tool for dismantling someone's effectiveness for Christ. There are plenty of options, but one less noticed is self-esteem. Your self-esteem is killing you...
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