All tagged Jesus
What happens in Isaiah 11 is incredible. You have our Father in heaven partnering with His creation to foretell of His Son who is embraced and empowered by God’s Spirit. This is just one of many passages that show us the harmony and majesty with which our God is Triune. God affirms the way that His Son is empowered by God’s Spirit.
Christ’s life becomes our life. Christ’s death becomes our death. And Christ’s resurrection will become our resurrection. Because in Christ, and through Christ, and with Christ, we are drawn out of the river of sin and death that all started at a town called Adam.
When people see me, do they just see a better-than-average person? Or do they see me acting in the world around me in the same way Jesus would act? Do my moral and ethical standards match his? Do I treat all people the same way he did? The answers to these questions will determine how effective I am as an evangelist.
Rather than beginning by convicting people of sin and its consequences, we need to begin by exploring the effectiveness of their present lifestyle in enabling them to have hope, peace, and purpose. From there we can move to the reality of failing to live by God’s principles for life (sin) and the need to be free from our failures (redemption).
Your testimony is not about being untouched by pain but about surviving it and finding God in the ashes. Healing is not about forgetting. It is about living differently because of what you’ve survived. The scar becomes a story. The loss becomes an altar. The former thing becomes a seed.
In order to evangelize in a way that is responsive to our communities, we need to place ourselves in the role of learners, entering into a two-way dialogue. We need to practice both observation and active listening. We need to listen without judgement as we seek to understand what others are saying, feeling, and doing.
In the face of much trouble, we must stand firm as a people who have been given the Way, Truth and Life that sets us free and grants us peace. It is getting more and more tempting for us to be swept into believing that the way to more freedom, more truth or a better life is a way that politics or culture try to prepare. This is not the truth we believe in, and it will not settle the fear or confusion we may have in our present circumstance.
I think we must also come to grips with two polarizing truths: God is a warrior, but one who fights on behalf of true justice, righteousness, and shalom, which often stands in sharp contradiction to what we call by the same name.
The game of hide-and-seek changes when we stop hiding and start seeking. God has already called out to us; He is waiting for us to answer. When we step into the light of His presence, we discover that He is never far away.
The arriving and present Jesus is the good news of God. That is why Paul will claim that it is the very power of God to save and deliver people (Rom 1:16). I will say more about good news as it is offered in Acts on another occasion. However, for the moment here, I want to make some clear and important claims about the good news that inform the life of the church and the practice of ministerial leadership.
The “burning bush” moment is that they have learned the good news of Jesus—that he died for their sins and was raised from the dead. Their call is to be born again into the Kingdom of God.
Ross’ principles are valuable and speak to the pastoral heart Ross holds towards Kingdom-people. Ross desires to remind Kingdom-people of the calling of God and the imagination of Kingdom-living available to each person in light of that calling.
It strikes me that any one of these communication qualities that I listed is a game-changer for the people around us. There are the rare people, like my dad, who have many admirable communication habits, but if you have any one of these and are maybe working on another, then you are in a strong position to show Jesus to others.
Prayer is our way of asking God to lead us not into temptation but to deliver us from evil through His grace and power! This is the only way we can be victorious.
Quit playing around with your sin. Stop it. Cut it off at the source. Be radical in stopping your addictions. Stop rationalizing and making excuses
We are a living example. 50 years. Any couple who makes 50 years is worth watching. How did they make it? What did they do? Here are a few things you will see in us that will help you.
If Jesus is God, if he is the ONLY way to salvation, and if we declare his lordship over our lives, then this is not just a matter of belief; it must be a matter of becoming, our daily lives TRANSFORM.
But in the arms of Jesus. She is more fully her and more truly home than she ever could have been here.
But into the darkness, God sends his light. It’s what he has been doing since the beginning. “Let there be light” were the first words spoken.
There are things that are part of obeying the gospel and living out the gospel. But they are not the good news.
