I've always been curious about one of the largest sections in today's Christian bookstores titled "Christian Living". Specifically I'd love to know what percentage of these books spend their time explaining and illuminating Scripture as the basis for their ideas. Each item in Paul's succinct five-step plan provided here is elucidated in much more detail elsewhere in Scripture, so what he's suggesting are really characteristics of a life obedient to God's Word and ways.

(more…)

One of the things I freely admit is that when I sin, I experience guilt and shame and the desire to make sure no one else knows about it. There's something about my upbringing that has instilled in me a strong sense of right and wrong and that doing the wrong thing is nothing to be proud of. This is why it's easier for me to talk more strongly about false teaching than about sin, because coming down too hard on sin is often a reminder to be careful of becoming a hypocrite, being that I've committed that sin myself in the past. But given recent trends these past few years, I'm concerned with the number of Christians whose moral center has become completely indistinguishable from that of non-Christians.

(more…)

I fear I'm going to date myself so that you'll think Lincoln was President when I was growing up, but I have rarely if ever experienced a church service in the second half of my life that was structured like the church services of the first half of my life. Once upon a time I went to church expecting participation beyond that of just the pastor wherein some might sing, some might testify, some might share from the Word. At times I myself participated in such ways. One of the thoughts I've been having lately is that perhaps one of the problems is we no longer see and hear firsthand what God is doing through all the members of our church because everything is so tightly orchestrated through the chosen few doing all the work from the platform.

(more…)

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that a side-effect of embracing any false teaching is diminishing time spent in God's Word. Right now there are literally hundreds of thousands of pastors and churches on this planet who have embraced some form of the Purpose Driven nonsense, and yet you don't have to study a lot of Scripture to come across passages like this one that refute core assertions of the Church Growth Movement. How does Paul's observation fit with the Purpose Driven's advice to cease preaching directly about sin and the cross in order to be more "seeker sensitive" and not make visitors feel uncomfortable?

(more…)

I know that it would be really difficult to navigate the Bible if someone hadn't come up with verse and chapter numbers, but there are times we have to remind ourselves that no such thing existed originally. So when Paul's letter to the Corinthians was originally read, what we now call chapter 13 was a contiguous bridge linking Paul's thoughts on either side into something greater than the individual parts. It wasn't easily singled out as something separate from everything around it. My long-time, regular challenge to Bible students is to have the courage never to read chapter 13 by itself, but to always read chapters 12 through 14 in a single breath to get the full, intended meaning.

(more…)

It seems to me that a lot of people turn to Paul's teachings on spiritual gifts — and to this chapter in particular — and treat it as some kind of "road map" for obtaining said gifts. Paul never ever provides a "how to" except to state that they're given by the Spirit "just as He wills". The greater context in which Paul is dealing with the Corinthians is the proper use of what they've already received. In spite of having been baptized in the Spirit and having received His gifts, this was a church with a lot of problems in the areas of idolatry, sexual immorality, division, grumbling, and so forth. Paul's not saying that these problems will be solved if they could somehow get the gifts, but that the problems persist because of their misapplication of them.

(more…)

I knew a church who seemed to go through the same, stagnant spiritual cycles over and over again, ever-seemingly arriving at the same point of crisis every few years. Whenever that point occurred, a kind of self-evaluation occurred which led them to conclude for one reason or another that one of the root causes was a deficiency of spiritual gifts. So each time they would conduct a "Spiritual Gifts Survey", a literal polling tool designed to provide an assessment of spiritual gifts, and then establish some kind of action plan to address the revealed gaps in the resulting "Spiritual Gifts Inventory". This is most certainly the kind of approach to take if you're manufacturing and selling a product in corporate America, but definitely not rooted in Scripture for operating a church.

(more…)