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Wednesday Is for Worship: “We Believe”

Wednesday-Is-for-Worship

Songs are powerful.  As we often hear, music soothes the savage beast.  They have the ability to affect us deeply on so many levels.  They can capture and remind us of an intense moment in our life, bringing either joy or sorrow to the foreground of our hearts and faces.  They can incite one to nearly every emotion imaginable.  They are powerful indeed!

But on this Wednesday, we must be reminded that songs are also a powerful teaching tool.  That’s one of the strongest reasons why Christianity is a singing religion.  Through verse and melody, the faith is transmitted into the hearts and minds of Jesus followers.  That’s why it’s so important for the Christian songs we sing to be biblically correct, but that’s another post I suppose.

A great example of how Christian songs teach is the Newboys recent release “We Believe.”  

It’s a Team Harvest

As laborers for Jesus, we are all working to reap a harvest through the gospel.  We plant, we water, and we harvest.  However, we don’t always get to do all three things with the same person.  Sometimes we’re the one who plants the gospel in a person’s life.  At other times we’re the one who waters that gospel so that it might take root, grow, bloom, and bear fruit.  Still other times we are the one who gets to harvest that soul by leading them to faith in Jesus Christ.  Of course, it’s God who brings the growth and the harvest, but He uses human agents to bring it about (Matthew 9:37-38).  It’s a blessing to be part of all three phases with the same person, but I would guess that that’s actually fairly rare.

Wednesday Is for Worship: I’m Going Free (Jailbreak)

Wednesday-Is-for-Worship

As many of you know, I’ve been a worship leader in some capacity since 1999.  I’m passionate about music, especially music that magnifies the Lord!

Today I want to reintroduce a weekly series that I’ve taken about a year-long break from, but since moving to pastor at Eastwood Baptist Church and getting to sing to the Lord under the leadership of our worship pastors Mark and Dana, I’ve felt led to pick the series back up again.  I pray it will be beneficial to you.

The series is called “Wednesday Is for Worship,” and each week I’ll post a worship song to God.  I pray you’ll use it first to sing praise to our great God and then to introduce it to others, hopefully even your congregation.  Some of the songs will be new.  Some will be old.  But, all of them will extol the name and glories of God.

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Have you ever been locked up in jail?  Whether we have or not, all of us have had the shackles of sin chaining us up.  Today’s Wednesday Is for Worship song is a celebration of being released from the bondage of sin and condemnation.  It’s called “I’m Going Free (Jailbreak).”

When One Wife Isn’t Enough: The Problems of Polygamy

Sister_Wives_TV_series_logoPolygamy is the next battleground for marriage in the United States.  In fact, just last month a federal judge declared laws on the books in Utah that guard against polygamy to be unconstitutional.  The state may still outlaw plural marriages, but it cannot prohibit polygamous cohabitating, thus weakening anti-polygamy law.  The plaintiff in the case was none other than the “star” of The Learning Channel’s (TLC) polygamy reality show Sister Wives, Kody Brown.  Mr. Brown, a fundamentalist Mormon, is an outspoken polygamist with four wives although he is only legally married to one of them.  Undoubtedly, he or someone else will challenge the outright ban of polygamy in the near future.

Is anybody surprised that this decision was handed down?  The cultural slippery slope that was predicted with the increasing legality of same-sex marriage is coming to bear.  Many argued that redefining marriage to include homosexual marriage would open the door for marriage of all types, and the prediction is proving to be accurate.

Why Did Jesus Take on Flesh?

Jesus in Manger

At the center of this and every Christian season is the baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.  This mysterious bundle of joy is none other than the eternal Son of God who took on flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14).  That’s the very thing we celebrate here at Christmas—the enfleshing of the Son of God, the incarnation.  He was sent on a mission from the Father to save sinners, and one of the absolutely necessary things Jesus had to do to complete His mission was take on a flesh and blood body just like we have.  But, why was that so crucial?  Why did Jesus take on flesh?  The Bible gives us at least ten reasons.

7 Reflections on the United Methodist Church’s Discipline Against Rev. Frank Schaefer

It may have been lost on us who hang out in only Baptist circles that our brothers and sisters in the United Methodist Church (UMC) had a fairly serious dust up last month.  For me, I have many friends in the UMC, some of whom are ordained by the church.  In fact, it was one of my ordained friends that passively brought my attention to the situation when she posted on her Facebook page a request for people to pray for the situation.  Furthermore, my wife and I have United Methodist ties in our past.  So, I am always interested about what’s going on with that denomination.  Indeed, all of us who are Christians should be concerned with what’s going on in the United Methodist Church because they are our brothers and sisters in Christ and stand as the largest mainline denomination in America.

But SBC Calvinists Believe That Too

The Southern Baptist Convention has certainly seen a mellowing out of what came to be quite a heated debate once again over Calvinism after the publishing of “A Statement of the Traditional Southern Baptist Understanding of God’s Plan of Salvation” in May 2012.  Of course, Dr. Frank Page’s appointment of the Calvinism Advisory Committee the next month in June 2012 and the unifying document they crafted and published in June 2013 called “Truth, Trust, and Testimony in a Time of Tension” (aka, T5) has had a great deal to do with the mellowing out we are now enjoying, or at least I am.

Nevertheless, there are those still in the convention that are really concerned about the “problem of Calvinism.”  In fact, I recently overheard a group of men eating breakfast before attending the Tennessee Baptist Convention discussing the issue of Calvinism in the SBC.  One of them declared about Calvinism, “Why if I believed that, I’d never go out and share the gospel because it would already be decided who’s going to be saved!”  Apparently this man understood SBC Calvinists to believe that people are saved apart from hearing and believing the gospel of Jesus Christ, which tells me that there’s still work to be done in communicating what SBC Calvinists actually believe.  I thought to myself and almost chimed in across the aisle, “No, SBC Calvinists believe too that we’ve got to share the gospel if anybody’s going to be saved.”  Unfortunately, that fellow had a misunderstanding of what SBC Calvinists believe.

5 Evangelism Principles on the Way to the Seller of Purple

We Southern Baptists are a Great Commission people.  It’s in our denominational blood!  As we come into the state convention season of SBC life, we will undoubtedly be challenged again and again to share the gospel, sHaRe tHe gOsPeL, SHARE THE GOSPEL!  Indeed, I welcome that clarion call from Scripture because it captures the heart of God and needs to be sounded again and again, but the Bible doesn’t simply tell us to share the gospel.  It also gives us principles for how to share the gospel.

One of the richest places to gain some vital principles for sharing the gospel comes from Acts 16.  There were find the history of Paul preaching the gospel in Asia Minor and Europe on his second missionary journey, which led him to a seller of purple named Lydia.  Five principles of evangelism jump out to me there in vv. 1-15 as Paul is heading for a divine appointment with this lady.