We have separated Christian work between the secular and the sacred. There are ordinary Christians with normal jobs and then there are the “really spiritual” Christians who are pastors or missionaries. We have the idea that to be truly spiritual we must have a full-time profession in a job that has spiritual undercurrents throughout it. This fallacy assumes, for one, that work is who you are; either a teacher or a lawyer or a janitor as if those things were intrinsic to your person. Secondly, and perhaps worse, it assumes that only those who are in visible ways advancing the Kingdom are the only doing any true spiritual work. It is my assertion that all work is spiritual work. Continue reading →
Spiritual reformation has been present throughout the history of the Christian church. It would be an error to think that those within the church were not seeking to turn away from the excesses around them and return to the principles of Christ until 1517 with Martin Luther. Even when looking at Israel we see the need after a few generations to come back and consider how we are to best follow God. This is a constant activity of the church and not just something that was settled in history.
Even as early as AD 270 people saw a need for spiritual renewal. With the legalization of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire it became increasingly difficult to know the true believers from those who were simply Christians of convenience; a problem that seems to be persistent throughout history. Continue reading →
Well, after many hours of tweaking, the blog is now updated with the latest version of Wordpress. There will be more changes working themselves out around the site, but for now I am just glad that everything is working and all my posts aren’t deleted.
The one thing that is nice about formal theological training is that your coursework requires you to purchase books in a variety of religious topics; many of which you are glad to add to your library. There are some duds that you will never pick up again but every so often you get one that surprises you.
This is the second of a two part post, to read the first part click here
Where does faith then come from? We have seen that faith does not come from oneself and thus any notion of a person simply “believing more” is ridicules. Faith finds its origin and completion fully and only from Christ. “Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith…” (Heb 12:2) God had blessed mankind with varying degrees of faith, which when we realize that faith is not our own it leads us to soberness in our position before God. Continue reading →
Faith is an interesting concept, one that most people seem to be quite confused about. We hear constantly about faith vs. reason, as if there is a contradiction in terms. Some see faith as simply whatever silly thing it is that you wish to believe in and has been made into a platitude with little meaning like “hope” has become. Christians are not making it any easier; a common evangelistic tract has a train with “fact” as a locomotive that pulls faith behind it, as if it was a simple matter of scientific investigation, or having the right knowledge. I know in my periods of extreme doubt I was told by my friends to “just believe” as if I could simply produce faith within me and still be honest with myself. So what is faith, and were does it come from? Continue reading →
Those who get into as many theological discussions as I do know of quite a few conversations that have involved the term “heresy” and less so the term “apostate.” Unfortunately, most people don’t use these terms properly, often they don’t know that those words mean anything other than something to call someone who you do not agree with. Heretic or apostate is not the equivalent of a Christian expletive, and if we reduce them to that sentiment then we will have no definitive statement for those who truly are heterodox or who have defected from the faith. Continue reading →
So I just spent about half an hour fixing my post “What Youth Ministry Isn’t” because it would not render correctly in IE. It rendered completely fine in Firefox, Opera, and even in the Google Chrome beta, but not in IE7. And the clincher of it all, is that the problem was that I copy and pasted from my Microsoft Word program. So a Microsoft web browser is not able to handle the code from a Microsoft word processor but all three of the other non-microsoft programs were able to handle it just fine… go figure. So I transfered it over to a plain text format and it worked just fine, of course I did have to go into the html and get ride of all of the left over code because even with the deleted text Office left some of the coding behind. I did end up loosing my clipart in the post, but I can live with that, at least I got it to work. I could always go back and put the picture back in, but its not really that important. It just seems like Internet Explorer is always playing catch up, I mean even the new IE 8 beta’s “new” features include crash recovery, improved CSS compliance, privacy mode, a true full screen mode, and a malware filter, basically features that the other browsers already have. Oh well, at least it’s all free and I don’t have to pay for any of it.
Within Calvinist theology there is an issue known as lapsarianism, which deals with the eternal decrees that God made regarding the fall of mankind. The two main views of this are called supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism. Historically the only confessions to contain a stance have been partial to the infra view, however, none have condemned a supra view either. I think the best way to explain these two views is to simply show the order with which they explain God’s decrees.
We have separated Christian work between the secular and the sacred. There are ordinary Christians with normal jobs and then there are the “really spiritual” Christians who are pastors or missionaries. We have the idea that to be truly spiritual we must have a full-time profession in a job that has spiritual undercurrents throughout it. This fallacy assumes, for one, that work is who you are; either a teacher or a lawyer or a janitor as if those things were intrinsic to your person. Secondly, and perhaps worse, it assumes that only those who are in visible ways advancing the Kingdom are the only doing any true spiritual work. It is my assertion that all work is spiritual work. Continue reading 
Those who get into as many theological discussions as I do know of quite a few conversations that have involved the term “heresy” and less so the term “apostate.” Unfortunately, most people don’t use these terms properly, often they don’t know that those words mean anything other than something to call someone who you do not agree with. Heretic or apostate is not the equivalent of a Christian expletive, and if we reduce them to that sentiment then we will have no definitive statement for those who truly are heterodox or who have defected from the faith. 
Within Calvinist theology there is an issue known as lapsarianism, which deals with the eternal decrees that God made regarding the fall of mankind. The two main views of this are called supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism. Historically the only confessions to contain a stance have been partial to the infra view, however, none have condemned a supra view either. I think the best way to explain these two views is to simply show the order with which they explain God’s decrees.