Loving God Passionately – Part 1

If you’re like me, you want to love God passionately. After all, when a scribe pressed Jesus to identify the greatest commandment, He summed up the entire law in two all-encompassing statements—love God with your entire being, and love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:30-31). Nothing in life is more important than these!

Expressing Adoration

All believers agree that loving God is a worthy goal, yet what does it really mean and how can an individual truly accomplish this? In my efforts to obey this command through the last three decades, I dissected the passage and scrutinized the key words. To sum up my research and experience, I have determined that loving God passionately is essentially “expressing adoration and delight in unbroken communion with Him.” But this is still pretty nebulous. Let’s drill down further.

10 Online Church Tools that can help your children’s ministry – Check Them Out!

1. Volunteer Scheduling
For volunteer scheduling, allows scheduling around peoples preferences and availability, which is key. It also has a web-based portion for accessing and updating the scheduling once it has been produced. If you are managing a lot of volunteers it is definitely worth a look.

2. Basecamp – online project collaboration

3. Donor Tools
Donor Tools is simple, inexpensive, and online donor management software for non-profits.

4. Unifyer
Unifyer is a web-based application that unites online communication, online networking, and dynamic media content for your ministry community. Like having a custom social network for your church.

5. ConnectionPower
Here is a way to find out who is missing from small groups and offers follow-up.

6. Jarbyco
Jarbyco is a customizable mobile application built around text messaging that lets you (1) quiz, poll, and survey the congregation, (2) message people, (3) create audience interaction, (4) leverage your website, and even more.

7. Children’s Church Training & Curriculum Great resource for children’s ministry resources, training, and more.

8. SermonPlayer.com
Free online media player for churches.

9. Wufoo
Build online forms (WYSIWYG).

10. ChurchMetrics
Just released from beta testing, this new free web-based application helps you keep tabs on attendance, giving, salvations, and baptisms at your church.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I am an employee of DiscipleLand. Regardless, I only recommend resources that I believe will be good for my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Your Destiny

And we know that in all things … (Rom 8:28).

I find such rest and comfort in this verse when I am faced with situations that I cannot understand. Though I may be a reasonably intelligent person, I simply do not possess the capacity or ability to fathom the breadth of God’s ways or the depth of His love (Ecc. 11:5). Disappointments, setbacks, and things that I just do not understand take place and I become concerned, or worried, or get upset, and then the Holy Spirit reminds me of this verse and I am greatly comforted:

… God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose (Rom 8:28).

There are some who believe that before the beginning of the world, God chose certain people to receive His gift of salvation. They point to verses like Ephesians 1:11. Others believe that God foreknew those who would respond to Him and upon those He predestined. What is clear is that God’s purpose for people was not an afterthought; it was settled before the foundation of the world. Man was made for God. Man can never be satisfied until he is in union with God. Man is incomplete without God. We were made to serve and honor God. If you have believed in Christ, you can rejoice in the fact that God has always known you. God’s love is eternal. His wisdom and power are supreme. He will guide and protect you until you one day stand in His presence.

CORE Discipleship Ministry

About CORE Discipleship Ministry:
In a day of instant coffee, instant popcorn, and microwave ovens, most of us want to hurry-up processes that take time to accomplish. God has no instant formulas for discipleship. God invites you to follow Him at whatever point in life you may be. Apart from His sacrificial work on the Cross, the most important thing our Lord did upon the earth was to make disciples. Discipleship, like raising children, is progressive, not instantaneous. Jesus’ discipleship process was relational, up-close and personal. He took a few men at various stages of life, poured His life and ministry into them, equipped them for ministry, empowered them, and released them to repeat the process – disciples are made as we go, baptize, and teach.

How To Impress God

When was the last time you impressed God?

You remember the story. Jesus went about doing good, and came home to Capernaum to do good there, too.

When Jesus entered the city, a centurion came to Him, asking for help. The centurion was a Gentile, a Roman, an officer of the army and someone familiar with rank and file. He understood authority.

Red pill or blue?

What do all the following have in common: The church building, order of worship (three hymns, scripture reading, choir music, unison prayers, pastoral prayer, sermon, offering, and benediction), the senior pastor, the sermon, the pastor’s chair, tax-exempt church status, gothic cathedrals, candles on the communion table, incense burning, taking the Lord’s Supper quarterly, the congregation standing and singing when the clergy enters, coming to church with a somber/reverent attitude, condemnation/guilt over missing a Sunday service, Elizabethan English, the altar call, the church bulletin, solo salvation hymn, door-to-door witnessing, evangelistic advertising/marketing, the decision card, bowing heads with eyes closed, raising a hand in response to a salvation message, one verse evangelism, the one hour sermon, the single bishop, hierarchical leadership, clergy and laity distinction, contemporary ordination, the title “pastor”, believers wearing their Sunday best for church, clergy attire, the clerical collar, the choir, the boy’s choir, funeral processions and orations, the worship team, the collection plate, ushers, infant baptism, sprinkling, the sinner’s prayer, personal savior, communion meal with only a cup and a cracker, Sunday school, the youth pastor, ministers of music, tithing and clergy salaries, seminary training, seeker churches, satellite campuses, vacation Bible school, children’s church, multi-media systems, church steeples, stained glass windows, the pulpit, the choir, the pew, the balcony, and concert style auditoriums?

Notable House Church Quotes

“We have no temples or alters.” This statement, referring to Christians, comes from the pen of the apologist (defender) Minicus Felix, c 200, and all evidence supports its accuracy. Throughout at least the first two centuries there were no church buildings as such, and this was so remarkable that to the pagan population, it was considered grounds for accusing the Christians of ‘atheism.’ In a world notable for the number of its holy shrines and the rivers of blood that flowed daily from the sacrificial victims, Christians were conspicuous in that they possessed neither the first nor engaged in the second.” Secular Use of Church Buildings, JG Davies, 1968: page 1.

Wolfang Simson: 15 Theses

God is changing the Church, and that, in turn, will change the world. Millions of Christians around the world are aware of an imminent reformation of global proportions. They say, in effect: “Church as we know it is preventing Church as God wants it.” A growing number of them are surprisingly hearing God say the very same things. There is a collective new awareness of age-old revelations, a corporate spiritual echo. In the following “15 Theses” I will summarize a part of this, and I am convinced that it reflects a part of what the Spirit of God is saying to the Church today. For some, it might be the proverbial fist-sized cloud on Elijah’s sky. Others already feel the pouring rain.

The Cross & The Crown

There should be no separation between evangelism/outreach and discipleship. The purpose of evangelism is to make disciples.

John Stott wrote, “The Christian landscape is strewn with the wreckage of derelict half-built towers. The ruins of those who began to build and were unable to finish. For thousands of people still ignore Christ’s warning and undertake to follow Him without first pausing to reflect on the cost of doing so. The result is the great scandal of Christendom today, so called nominal Christianity. In countries to which Christian civilization has spread, large numbers of people have covered themselves with a decent but thin veneer of Christianity. They have allowed themselves to become somewhat involved, enough to be respectable but not enough to be uncomfortable. Their religion is a great soft cushion. It protects them from the hard unpleasantness of life while changing its place and shape to suit their convenience. No wonder the cynics speak of hypocrites in the church and dismiss religion as escapism.”

Not Guilty!

Guilt is everywhere around us and in us.

Most of us were raised under the heaviness of guilt-induced shame (a form of manipulation used to control another person). Parents use guilt to motivate their children when they say things like, “You should be ashamed of yourself!” or “I’ve told you a hundred times, and you’re still not cleaning your room!” or “Can’t you be more responsible!” or “You shouldn’t be so hateful,” or “After all we’ve done for you, this is how you repay us?” We grow up hearing such things on an almost daily basis, and somehow it gets woven into the very fabric of our souls. We begin to believe that we will never measure up.