If you thought it was cool for God to include you in his plan before the earth was formed, or that his promise is to do more than adopt you, then today’s pledge will knock your socks off: Ephesians 1.19: “I pray that you will begin to understand the incredible greatness of his power for us who believe him.  This is the same mighty power that raised Christ from the dead.” If you’re still unsure of the need or importance of the churc...

Continuing our thoughts on the need and beauty of the Church from Ephesians, it would be enough that God, before time began, chose to include us in his master plan to redeem the universe.  But there's more...it turns out it's more than just the plan - it includes a promise as well. "And when you believed in Christ, he identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom he promised long ago.  The Spirit is God’s guarantee tha...

Last time the question was, "Why bother with church?"  Maybe a good place to start is:  You've been personally chosen. "Long ago, even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes.  His unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ.  And this gave him great pleasure….God’s secret plan has now been revealed to ...

Two boys were talking one Saturday when one said to the other, “Hey, why don’t you come to church with me this Sunday?”  His friend replied, “No thanks, I belong to a different abomination.”  Even though the Bible clearly says that God's chief mechanism of working in the world is his sons and daughters - the Church - there are many who would just as soon take a pass.  And it's a fact that institutionalized religion does itself no...

The more convoluted and complex life gets, the more I value simplicity. There's a great story about an American consultant who was in a coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked.  Inside the small boat were several large tuna; the American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied, "Only a little while."  The consultant then asked why di...

Copper is a great conductor of energy.  Whether you’re transmitting a human voice over a copper wire, or distributing heat evenly across the bottom of a cooking pan, copper is known as a terrific aqueduct. It strikes me that in order to be the hands and feet of Christ in the world today, to take up Jesus' purpose and do the work he would be doing if he were still here, we need to become copper; an unobstructed channel through which God can ...

We've talked in the last two posts about common misunderstandings about forgiveness:  both what seem to be perfectly good reasons not to go to the effort of forgiving, and then redefining the word biblically. Frederick Buechner's quote in the first blog bluntly taught us that in retaining anger, we are the chief casualty, not the person we begrudge.  Lewis Smedes said, "Vengeance is a passion to get even.  It is a hot desire to give back...

Last time we began a series on forgiveness by discussing all the rational reasons why we really shouldn't have to forgive people; it turns out everything came back to pride.  I think at least part of our reluctance to forgive and extend grace is because over time, our understanding of it has become skewed; our definition has become distorted. First, what forgiveness is not: Forgetting.  It's just not possible, and we set ourselves up for...

I'm not a big Saturday Night Live fan, but I do enjoy the "Weekend Update," particularly when they do the segment called "REALLY?!?"  They seem to find the most absurd of the week's news stories, and then keep asking "really?"  "REALLY??" As we move into new seasons of life, or begin new chapters after periods of transition or painful events, it's much better to "travel light" as Max Lucado would say.  And perhaps the biggest part of unload...

As we conclude this series on leading by serving, the final point to make is that servant leadership is a collaborative, team-based effort, and not dependent on one powerful type-A personality at the top. One of the best leadership books I've read is The Starfish and the Spider, which makes this point: most organizations are like spiders.  Cut off a spider's head (remove the top leader) and everything falls into chaos.  But cut off an arm or...