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.
Our church has been thinking a lot about baptism, the Lord's supper, church membership and how all of them tie together. One of the areas where this raises big questions is concerning children. Should children be baptized and brought into membership and the Lord's supper? As always, we turn to God's word for our answer. Were children baptized in the New Testament? There ...
Keep ReadingThe elders are considering a change in our constitution. A change in the constitution requires a vote from the congregation, so we wanted to explain what this change is. Namely, the consideration is to remove the age requirement of 18 years old to be a member. This may seem to be a somewhat minor change, but this touches several areas that converge together in a signific...
Keep ReadingNo matter how hard people try, they can't escape the fear of death. They can surround themselves with a stack of evolutionary textbooks, a hoard of hardened atheists, and a phone full of comedy routines about aging, but death still haunts them. My understanding is that the original zombie movies were a representation of the slow and creeping inevitability of death. Sure,...
Keep ReadingRight now in our culture the worst words you can be called are a bigot and a racist. For those kinds of no-good people the key attitude is that of superiority, and the key action is discrimination. Most assuredly, there are countless ways to play the roles of bigot and racist which are straight out of hell. But what the forces of hell are really good at is twisting the t...
Keep ReadingBack in 2015, we all braced for the fallout from the Supreme Court Obergefell decision that legalized same-sex marriage. In terms of moral revolutions things have been happening at warp speed, and that decision made it seem like things were going to instantly implode. Instant implosion did not happen. Like most things on a national scale, the fallout was real but not imm...
Keep ReadingOur God is a God of order. We see his order everywhere we look. Order is found in the smallest arrangement of the atom all the way to the largest galaxies. Not only is it found in the physics of natural laws, but also in the order of personal relationships. God has set up order for the family (headship), for society (government) and for churches (elders). Now, we are all...
Keep ReadingRecently, Dr. Michael Kruger, the Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary, gave a great answer to this question. His answer, put in a nutshell, is that these incredibly smart people are applying all of their intellect within a certain paradigm or worldview. They have not evaluated all of the evidence and found Christianity wanti...
Keep ReadingAt the beginning of a new year, when resolutions are fresh, zeal is high and determination is bubbling over, the battle cry for spiritual disciplines harmonizes perfectly with the moment. There is a reason why people feel the need to let loose a battle cry: they know that it is hard. We live in an entertainment age with distractions (and snack food) abounding in every no...
Keep ReadingOne of the most common things you heard in the last days of 2020 was the glee of being done with that horrid year. 2020 wasa trip. But was it really? When you are thinking about something you have to work hard to think about it rightly;thinking can go wrong on so many levels. You can think about things with the wrong information or with a lack of information. You can thi...
Keep ReadingAmong the list of common questions people ask this one hasrisen higher and higher on the list. As many in our culture move farther and farther away from the agrarian life, so too they are moving farther away from typical notions of animal life. What were once work animals or even simply pets are now considered "kids" and furry babies. The growing list of what qualifies a...
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