Blogs

 One of my favorite passages is at the end of the book of Luke, in chapter 24.  Jesus had already died on the cross, been buried, and risen to life again.  He was walking down the road when some of his followers were walking down the road and didn't recognize him as he began to walk alongside of them.  They were clearly depressed and Jesus asked what the problem was.

We often talk about what the church is.  It's the body of believers, those called to be God's people.  It is a people on mission with the gospel.  It is a people with mixed gifting that love and serve each other as family.  It is a people called to continue the ministry work of Jesus.
 
But what is the church "not"?
 

My wife and I sat down with our three children Caleb (6), Sierra (4), and Jacob (3) and asked them to help us think of ways that we can be involved in our community and spend time with our neighbors.  We let them say anything they wanted and we could sort through the ideas later and pick things to do.  Here's the list:
 
Go camping and singing music

Statistics can be interesting.  Here are a few from The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.  Though the data is a little over a year old I expect its still valid. (Source data)
 
All of these numbers are for Idaho only.
Percent of people who say they are certain that God exists - 71%

When you are studying what to say to your people, if you have any concern for their souls, you will oft be thinking with yourself, ‘How shall I get within them? and what shall I say, that is most likely to convince them, and convert them, and promote their salvation!

It is important that I'm reminded about the seriousness of following Jesus.  Despite the claims of some churches that invite you to take Jesus for a test drive and dabble in the faith until you want to go deeper, Jesus never gave us the option of being a casual Christian.  The name of our church comes from Matthew 16:24:
 

I've decided to migrate to a slightly different blogging software package to make maintenance of the jcfollowers.com website and my blog more integrated.  To do that I had to manually copy some of my old blog posts into the new system.  I've lost some formatting and whatnot but the basic content is there.  The URLs to blog posts have changed, so if you have a link to an old post it is most likely broken now but I'll try to setup a redirect/search so old links should get people pretty close to the orginal post.
Sorry for any inconvenience.

We often talk about discipleship in terms of change.  We want to see ourselves and the people around us changing, acting differently, talking differently.  But what is the nature of Christian change?  It goes far beyond the surface, is much deeper than changes in behavior.
Christian change is a change of identity.  It is a change of “who we are”.  It is a change of our values and ambitions.

I’m currently enjoying time in a study group for pastors and we’re reading through the book “How People Change” by Timothy Lane and Paul Tripp.  The authors of the book make a great statement: “We are new creatures in Christ even in a world full of heat! But we all know that it is easy to forget the wonderful things that are ours as children of God.” That gets to the heart of why we often fail to change.  We are who God makes us, yet we forget what that means.

Prior to Jesus’ ministry, we saw the prophet John calling people to repent and prepare for the coming Kingdom of God, see Matthew 3:1.  His ministry brought the first prophetic voice to be heard in Israel for a long time.  For about 400 years prior to John’s Spirit-breathed proclamations, there had been a divine silence.  The Old Testament prophets had closed their communication with the anticipation of the coming Savior.