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If you have been a Christian for any length of time, you have undoubtedly been encouraged to grow in your faith by “studying the Bible,” “having a daily quiet time, “ or “memorizing the Word.” We are told the more diligent we are in following these Christian disciplines the more we will grow in our spiritual lives, i.e., the more successful we will become in obeying the commands in Scripture. I grew up with this well-known adage: “Either the Bible will keep you from…

As we have discussed what the Bible calls “walking by faith” or “living by faith”  over the past weeks, I have emphasized that these familiar, much-used phrases actually represent a little-experienced way to live. Deciding to be a Christian by believing that Jesus died for our sins does not mean that we are “walking by faith,” also called in the Bible, “walking in the Spirit” or “living in the Spirit.” Nor do these biblical terms refer to me, now that I am a Christian,…

“Have you retired from actively, aggressively serving God?” Hearing that question and sensing the challenge in it, I believe the person being asked, more often than not, is immediately overcome with 1.) energy-sapping fatigue, or 2.) crushing guilt for “putting his hand to the plow” and then “drawing back”, or 3.) maybe even anger, remembering again the hypocrisy, politics, empire building and greed he saw in the church. The purpose of a question like that is generally to get you to evaluate your life…

There is nothing as crucial as living in positive reality, by faith alone, rather than in a negative movie film by trying to be “good.” As we saw last week, we are living in one or the other. The irony is that by living life in a movie with the film a negative, the very characteristics we see in our lives that we desperately try to eliminate as being “bad things” are really “good” things. Being a sinner, losing, being weak, being last, being…

A few mornings ago I woke up in the middle of a dream in which I was watching a movie. I have since completely forgotten what the movie was about, but I remember vividly what the movie looked like. The moving pictures were in negative film, just like the negatives that were always included with the positive prints in the package we would received back from the film developer, but in my dream they were in a movie film I was watching. What should…

All day, every day, God is busily at work spreading the word of what happened at the cross throughout His universe, a word that many either haven’t heard, don’t understand or actively resist. The word of the cross is this: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Many of us, and I use the plural advisedly and without hesitation, have literally worn ourselves out trying our best to take this Gospel to the…

As a young married couple in the Summer of 1973, Jill and I had just returned to Seattle from an exhilarating one-year adventure. We had lived in a Christian community right in the middle of the hippies in Isla Vista, California, the location of the Santa Barbara branch of the University of California, UCSB. We had rented out our house in the University District in Seattle while we were gone and now, with 2.5 children—our daughter Ramah would be born that Fall—we were headed…

When we discuss the kingdom of God, much seems to be theoretical and not very practical. Because of our pietistic backgrounds, i.e., everything that has to do with God is “spiritual” and has nothing to do with real life. These blog postings make no sense, because Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is in your heart. Right, Robert?” Yes, it obviously begins in our hearts, but it does not end there. As we have seen in these postings, Jesus’ reign will be universal and…

In the Lord’s Prayer, we are exhorted to pray, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on the earth as it is in Heaven,” Though we have prayed that prayer many times, what it actually means—that the rule of Jesus be established here on the earth through us, as Genesis 1:26 and Matthew 28:18 clearly teach—is a foreign concept to many Christians. It is a brand new worldview, a dramatic shift in previous presuppositions. When it is presented, as I have done on these…

“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle”― Sun Tzu, The Art of War. It would appear to a perceptive observer that Humanism, after a subtle, 100+ year war with Christianity for ascendancy in our country, is winning the battle. With its twin doctrines of evolution and communism/socialism forming two of its legs, Humanism has become the stool upon which America sits today. We, as the church, once determined what was acceptable behavior in our culture. Civil leaders were forced by public opinion to…