So Ready for Christmas

It is futile to pretend that Christmas does not exist and counterproductive to dismiss it without an explanation. While it is unwise and confusing to sing songs like Silent Night and Joy to the World this time of year or to send Christmas greetings with nativity scenes upon them, the days leading up to the twenty-fifth of December provide fertile ground for respectful religious conversation. Many people are temporarily in a mood to talk about Jesus – it’s a mood that will not be repeated until spring and then not again until next Christmas.

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Christian

Christian is a noun that implies a description – a person who is striving to behave and think like his Master, Jesus the Christ. Christian, however, has come to mean any system or thing that is thought to be consistent with the teaching of Christ or the church.

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Fooling Yourself

Self-delusion is the most insidious kind, for if I believe another’s lie, I can more easily change my mind and abandon it. If I believe my own lies, I am on both sides of the sin – I’m both teller and hearer and I have much more invested in the faulty conclusion. We are all, however, prone to self-delusion when it suits us.

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Bringing Reproach on the Church

No sin is harmless, for even the least offense is part of the burden that Christ bore upon the cross for us (First Peter 2:24). Those sins which obtain a measure of infamy, however, have the potential to humiliate those closest to us and to bring the church under the community’s reproach where its future effectiveness is put in doubt.

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If You Choose Not To Decide, You Still Have Made a Choice

The next time you hear or read the Lord’s invitation, remember that if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

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They Devoted Themselves

The work of the infant church, which must be imitated by the modern one, involves evangelism, edification, enthusiasm and education.

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A Member of The Body

Worshipers become more than just visitors to an address, but members and integral parts of the structure – living stones, Peter called them.

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Deal With The Preacher

Obituaries and funerals are usually polite settings, occasions to remember the good times, even if few, and to gloss over the bad, no matter how bad. Some resort to a certain amount of fiction to make themselves feel better or to avoid an unpleasant reality. Maybe loved ones and well-wishers can afford that luxury, but the person in the pine box cannot. And someday, that person will be you.

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No Schism in the Body

The unity of believers is not only predicated upon doctrinal agreement, but also upon personal harmony, forbearance and selflessness. We endeavor to speak the same things in matters of the faith, but to be longsuffering and open-minded when it comes to matters of personality, opinion and liberty. It is love, after all, that is the bond of perfection.

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A Cappella By Choice?

The current language is subtle, cunningly devised to prepare for an eventual shift to the other side without necessarily offending the old mossbacks who doggedly insist that non-instrumental music in worship is a matter of the faith. The change agents are wise as serpents, but hardly as innocent as doves.

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I Got Burned

We’ve all been burned. Whether by the sun, a hot slice of pizza or a decaffeinated mishap, everyone eventually gains the object lesson that is a burn. In the New Testament, Jesus used burning – the smoldering Gehenna garbage dump outside of Jerusalem – as an illustration of the eternal penalty for rejecting grace. He described that condemnation as outer darkness and its soundtrack as wailing cries and gnashing teeth.

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The Things The Lord Tells Me To Say

God even continues to enlist men to tell forth his will from those inspired pages – every Christian has some interest in sharing the gospel, but those men who endeavor to preach the gospel have a clear responsibility to behave as honorably as Micaiah described.

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Appealing to God

Water baptism is more than a ritual washing or an outward expression of some inner feeling – the response of the saved. Baptism itself is the appeal for mercy, an act not of merit, but surely of obedience.

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Seductress

There is another seductress today who promotes her body and offers her prey nothing but dissatisfaction and frustration. She is the pixellated seductress of mass and personal media who shares images of herself with any who care to look, to leer or to lust.

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You Never Mentioned Him

The day of judgment will be filled with sadness for all whose friends and fellow travelers never mentioned him. It is not that they have an excuse for their disbelief, for the message was still there. It is that they never received the motivation that a heartfelt invitation of someone near to them might have provided. Perhaps your invitation would have made all the difference.

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Twisted Scripture

Scripture is twisted, however, when the one working with it is either ignorantly unskilled or maliciously duplicitous. Some twist the scripture because they do not know any better; their ignorance, while not entirely forgivable, is at least correctible. Others do violence to the faith on purpose, choosing to misinterpret God’s word because it is easier that way.

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Born To Be Mild

Our world has forgotten to value the mild – gentleness, caution, kindness, humility. When everyone – man and woman – insists on preeminence and attention, what can follow but rivalry, greed and conflict?

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Always Learning

Where Ezekiel and John were instructed to ingest God’s word as a symbolic acquisition of the message, we are surely starved in the spirit if we do not adopt just as rounded a diet. God’s word is milk for the novice, meat for the mature.

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Stay Awake

Vigilance is the key to preparedness. Although the disciples of Christ have spent two shared millennia in waiting on him, it does not follow that the time for complacency has come.

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Cut Straight

Rather than conceal or obscure texts that might offend the hearer, the teacher is required to expose him even to inconvenient truths that should motivate him to repentance, keeping back nothing that is helpful to that end. Cutting the word straight requires knowledge of the audience.

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