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.
If you have made a habit of being at prayer meetings, you have probably been in the following situation before. As requests are being offered, someone asks prayer for Aunt Tilly's bunion. If the leader has his wits about him, this can be steered into a profitable time of prayer for Aunt Tilly. But sadly, many a saint has been led in prayer for untold numbers of hips, fee...
Keep ReadingI have been preparing for my India trip where I will be teaching pastors and church leaders how to faithfully handle the Psalms and other poetry scripture. In that preparation, I will have to deal with an issue many Christians would rather ignore: imprecatory psalms. The imprecatory psalms are those in which the biblical writer, usually David, is calling down destruction...
Keep ReadingPrayer can be powerful. As Spurgeon said, it can be "the slender nerve that moves the muscle of omnipotence." But prayer can also be impotent and not get past your ceiling! We need to know the difference between the two because there will be times when we have to wait. In that waiting time, how do you we know if we are actually waiting for God's working to become manifes...
Keep ReadingYou may not know it but there is power coursing around you this very moment. It is invisible but it is as real as the air you're breathing. What that power is doing none of us know exactly, but it is doing something. What power is this you ask? Electrical power? Gravitational power? No. It is something far more impactful and penetrating. It reaches through the physical...
Keep ReadingI have discovered the answer to an age old question that many have wrestled with in vain. The question is this: if you had three wishes from a genie in a bottle what would you wish for? Many have tried the approach of "I would ask for infinite wishes", but as we learned in Aladdin, that contingency has been covered by Genie protocol. So what do you do? (Brace for profu...
Keep ReadingPrioritization. I put that word first because, wellyou know. Prioritization is one of those things that we all know we need to do, but we don't because, ironically, it is not a priority. It is just easier to do what is easy (how is that for an earth-shaking observation?). The need, and the difficulty, of prioritization is familiar to us all and is a reality in every ar...
Keep Reading"Never has a man spoken the way this man speaks." This was the stunned assertion of the guards in John 7:46, who were supposed to arrest Jesus, but they just couldn't bring themselves to do it. Jesus was too unique, too powerful, too "otherly." Jesus' words on prayer are like this as well. The insight, encouragement, and compulsion he creates when it comes to prayer i...
Keep ReadingIn the last post about prayer, we looked at a few short passages about the incredible power prayer unleashes. Prayer gets things happening whether we see it or not. Perhaps the only thing more exciting is to be incessantly told to use it incessantly. This feels almost too good to be true. I can easily imagine being told never to use a tool of immense power unless it was ...
Keep ReadingNitty-Gritty. You have probably used that term before. It refers to the small details of life where real difficulty is found and real work has to be done. Nit and grit are things that have to be dealt with, but you only get to it when you are elbows deep in a project. The shiny exterior of the project is no longer in view. All you can see now are the little problems that...
Keep Reading"Yesterday in Baltimore, something didn't happen, despite convincing accounts that it did." This is the opening line of a NPR story about a non-shooting in Baltimore. There was an incident where multiple people described police shooting a man who was running away from them. While their testimony was passionate and spoken with a degree of certainty, it didn't actually hap...
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