Missions
Evangelism: God's Passion – Our Mission
This will be my last post in this series, and it will be my shortest. I want to cap this all off by tying it back to the the subtitle of this series: God’s Passion – Our Mission. We’ll take this one half at a time. God’s Passion God’s passion is His family. Like any good father, He wants all those He loves to be brought home. He desires to be reconciled with the prodigals. That’s why He has waited…
Evangelism: In Defense of Miracles
I wrote previously about two translations of the word dynamin in the verse Acts 1:8. The word is most often—and very properly—translated as “power,” but it can also be translated, and has been translated in other passages, as “miraculous power” or “ability.” For many people, they read “explosive power” back into the text, which is, honestly, bad scholarship. I hope that I have not done further damage by contrasting the “explosive power” of miracles with the “empowered abilities” of the…
Evangelism: "But You Shall Receive Power"
I’ve been doing some reading about evangelism for a class that I’m taking, and in my readings, I found the answer to two questions that I’ve been working through. And since I passed nearly every part of kindergarten—darn handwriting requirements—I learned to share. As a Pentecostal, I believe in the Baptism of the Holy Spirit as described in the New Testament, but I’ve often taken issue with the bombastic language that many use to describe the Baptism of the Spirit…
For the Coming Glory
Life on Earth isn’t easy, and being Christians doesn’t necessarily make it any easier. God calls us to serve Him by serving and loving others. He calls us to go to extremes, to risk shame and embarrassment, to embrace humility, and to make God’s passion our own. When prodigals find themselves in the pig stye, far from Father God, we are to be His ambassadors to those lost in the filth of a messy life. This is not an appealing…
It's Our Church
The church is a singular entity—one body, one family, gathering, locally, in one place. And yet it’s made up of several, even hundreds, of individuals. Hundreds of individuals united under the banner of one King for one purpose: announcing His triumph over death and the resurrection power that He offers to all who are dead in their sin. Jesus was resurrected, proving Himself to be the Son of God with the power to remove our sin and resurrect us as…
Holiness: Purity from Purpose
We often think of “holiness” as a synonym for “purity,” but this is a bit backwards. To be holy, something must be set aside for a special, divine purpose. When we set something apart for God, we refuse to profane it, to waste it on common use. That’s where the purity comes from—we purify it by setting it apart for something special. Treating something as holy makes it pure. Of course, this forces us to ask, “For what purpose have…