It may be hard to live with them, but it is impossible to live without them! For the next three posts, I am going to be a pastoral theologian. I have some theological-biblical thoughts that will be applied in pastoral and spiritual ways. This is a supplement to the message on Wisdom (and Foolishness) but […]
Resources to Help You Go Deeper Biblical instruction. Theological training. Spiritual formation. Moral renovation. The church has a responsibility to teach, train, equip, explain, guide, motivate, illustrate, illumine, and generally communicate the entire Word of God and the things of God to the people of God. We also have a responsibility to do this missionally. […]
The Emotional Life My fourth concern is our struggle with emotions in general. Anger suffers from our more general lack of a way to deal with emotions. Emotions. Can you trust them? Many Christians don’t think you can. This is the result of some unhelpful teaching on emotions that became pretty common in some circles. […]
To get at this concern, let’s have a hypothetical conversation. Scenario One: You say, “I’m angry with God.” I say, “Hmm. What are you doing about your anger with God?” Your answer: Silence. I rest my case. Angry at God and doing nothing about it. That is hazardous to your heart and souring to your […]
Now for my second concern. It’s pretty straight forward. I decided to go back and do a little survey of what the Bible says about anger. Maybe you will be helped by this in the way I was. First, the words anger and angry are not often used in the New Testament. In the Old […]
But Can You Handle It? In my sermon on September 30, I made brief comments on how anger with God doesn’t do you much good when you are going through hard times. This may have been the part of the series What Shall I Do When Life Gets Hard? that generated the most comments from people. […]
A Short Theological-Spiritual Reflection When I was a sophomore in college, a little book was revolutionary for me. The book was Fully Human, Fully Alive by John Powell. Later, I discovered that phrase had its origins in one of the ancient church theologians (Irenaeus) who said, “For the glory of God is the one fully […]
Despite the standard secular mantra that all religions are the same and teach the same thing, nothing could be further from the truth. All religions do have things in common, like a belief in God, praying to God, holy writings that tell the followers about God, and practices of worship. But every religion has […]
Read this wonderful explanation of what is included in salvation by John Wesley, the great revivalist and founder of the Methodist church: By salvation I mean, not barely deliverance from hell, or going to heaven, but a present deliverance from sin, a restoration of the soul to its primitive health, its original purity; a recovery of […]
The LORD. When the Bible talks about God the LORD, one of the constant descriptions is the mightiness of the Lord. The Lord is the Almighty. There is another wonderful word that describes our mighty, Almighty Lord. It is the word sovereign. Sovereign and Lord are synonyms. A sovereign is a lord and a lord […]