Viewing entries tagged
spiritual growth
Do you ever wonder why God gave us cravings for potato chips, chocolate, and bacon? There’s no indication that the members of the Trinity were sitting around in eternity past sipping wine or grilling steaks. Our hunger for food and our need for it to sustain us is part of God’s design for humanity. As you consider what the Bible teaches, a picture emerges of God’s purpose in food and how we should relate to it.
We were created for connection, so we all feel a longing for relationships. In a church, there are lots of opportunities to get to know others, but if we don’t understand the difference between friendship and fellowship, we can miss out on what God wants to do in our lives. Consider what happens when we don’t get this right.
How the transgender movement helps us better understand the Bible’s teaching about spiritual growth.
If you just need some life hacks, maybe a Christian self-help book will do. But if you realize that your problems go deeper than that, you need something more powerful. When you invest in daily Bible reading, you’re taking a blow torch to the impurities in your life and a sledgehammer to the hardhearted attitudes that get in the way of your growth.
When we decided that it would be cheaper to pump our own gas than have someone do it for us, the calculation was that it was gas that we needed, and the people involved were just a wasted expense. The same value judgment went into ATM machines and self-serve kiosks. It’s only natural that we would be tempted to see church through the same lens that we see gas stations, banks, and grocery stores.
The tendency is to view verses about hope like the decorations of the Bible – pleasant thoughts that aren’t very functional. But getting serious about hope is one of the primary means God has given us to make progress in personal growth and maturity.
I was speaking to someone recently and I could see that they were struggling to understand what felt like mixed signals in the Bible. On the one hand, there are verses that speak of believers as being clean, washed of their sins, forgiven, and made holy. On the other hand, there are verses that speak of God being grieved by our sins and disciplining us for them. When the Bible speaks of our forgiveness and cleansing is God just trying to inspire us? Or when the Bible speaks of the ongoing presence of our sins is God just trying to scare us? When God sees His children is He shaking His head in frustration? Or is He graciously looking away from the areas where we still falter? How should believers understand God’s attitude toward them when they sin? Let me suggest that there are two hats that can help us make sense of the Bible’s competing descriptions of God’s attitude toward us.
In 2016, Jerry Bridges passed away from heart failure. His writings, perhaps more than anyone, have made a deep impact on my life. I share them with you in the hopes that maybe you’ll add one of them to your summer reading list.
Over time, things that initially shock us don’t anymore. I think something similar happens with the strangeness of baptism. It’s weird, right? If I asked you about your first day at work or your first time at a photography class and you said that they gathered everybody around to see all the new people dunked in a pool or a lake before they got started, I’d be pretty surprised. That would seem like a really strange company or club to me! So why have churches been doing that for the last 2,000 years? Let me give four reasons.
I’m taking a preaching course this fall with Bryan Chapell. For the last 20 years, he’s been a bit of a guru in the area of Christ-centred preaching. In his book, “Christ-Centered Sermons,” he asks a provocative question. “What is the primary reason that sin has power in our lives?” I wonder how you’d answer that question. I can almost hear people’s answers. “I don’t pray enough.” “I don’t read the Bible enough.” “I don’t try hard enough.” “I’m not disciplined enough.” Do you recognize your own answer yet? In one sense, those answers may be part of the reason why sin has power in our lives, but he argues that the ultimate answer is something else. At the risk of stating the obvious, he says that the ultimate reason that sin has power over us is that we love it. In fact, even if we say that we love Jesus, in the moment that we commit a sin, we love that sin more than we love Jesus.
