Church Life

May you attach your sense of self, your meaning and purpose, your moral compass, and your hopes and dreams to the message delivered in that upper room and to the actual moment of sacrifice on that hill outside the city.

So this season, how about scanning your heart and life? How about looking for those places where you still need to die to self? How about crying out for the willingness to take up your cross and follow Jesus in his death?

Let go of things you tend to prize. Let this season of sacrifice loosen your hands and free your heart. Let go of some of your comforts, things that have perhaps comforted you too much, so that your heart is free to seek a better Comforter.

Joyless people are miserable people. They haven’t tasted and seen that the Lord is good. They haven’t yet learned that it’s through our times of suffering that the Lord often does his best work. I have been in a joyless place, and chances are you have, too.

How can we let ourselves forget or neglect or even trivialize this sacrifice? For all our grand plans for church renewal, for contemporary worship, for being missional, for connecting with the millennials, for connecting with the “nones” and now for connecting with Generation Z, we should never downplay that sacred institution given by our sacrificial …

Weddings honor marriage. The visual of a man separating from his parents and uniting with his wife esteem marriage as highly valuable.

Pastors and church leaders are given the difficult task of counseling members through the hard times of life. How can a leader not try and fix each and every problem presented to them by members?