Blog published on Acts 29 Website: Called, Led, Blessed

A quick update - the blog I wrote a while back detailing my history with Acts 29 was published today on the Acts 29 website. Pretty cool!

You can check it out here:

http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/called-led-blessed/

Feel free to leave comments on it over there!

Comments

The Gospel, Faith, and Asking Jesus into Your Heart

Kelly, our wonderful Trailhead Kids leader, sent me a link to a great blog over at Sojourn Church. It is titled " 9 Reasons not to Ask Jesus into your Heart ." You should read it because it is clear, succinct, and right. I am not a fan of asking Jesus into your heart. I am not a fan of committing your life to Christ or making him Lord of your life or asking Jesus to be your friend, either. Strange thing for a pastor to say, right? Wrong. After I became a believer and started working in a Christian high school, I came to see just how short those kinds of sayings fall from leading people to the real gospel. As a new believer (and a lover of all things English), I loved my job, most of the things about my school, and, of course, my students. One of the key frustrations I had, though, was that so many of my students claimed to follow Jesus but so few of them seemed to know him or love him. So, about two months into the school year, I de...

Masturbation, Onanism, and Injustice

The Real Sin of Onan I was a teenage new believer the first time I heard someone talk about the “sin of Onan.” The message was clear—and honestly, kind of terrifying: don’t masturbate. God killed a guy for it once. That story, told in Genesis 38, got repeated in various youth group talks and church settings. Onan became shorthand for what not to do with your body when you’re alone. His name was a warning: “Don’t be like Onan.” Touch yourself like that and God might just touch you to kill you. But when I actually read the passage, I found that it doesn’t say what I was told it says. An Old Reading That Misses the Point It’s true that for centuries—especially in medieval Roman Catholic tradition—this passage was interpreted as a condemnation of any “spilling of seed.” The act of ejaculation outside the context of procreation, whether through withdrawal or masturbation, was viewed as inherently sinful. That interpretation shaped a lot of what was passed down in purity cu...

Thoughts on the Church being the Church

So, a strange thought came to me in the shower the other day. Being a pastor is like being a Chinese buffet. Everyone shows up with different and specific expectations and everyone walks away disappointed. This thought didn't come to me because I was feeling sorry for myself, because I'm not. I love what I do because of who I do it for (Jesus), and I have no internal need to meet everyone's expectations of me. My job is to please the one who loved me and called me to himself. (And, awesome thought, he is already pleased with me and will continue to be because I am covered with Christ, the delight of God!) The thought actually came to me as I was thinking about how the church today has lost the experience of being the church. O ur cultural Christianity has essentially taken all the “one another's” of scripture and robbed them of their community experience. Like Colossians 3:16. It says Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching a...

Glorious Mud

Search This Blog