Recent Posts

Challenge & Cultivate Your Prayer Life: Intercession Exercise (For Your Marriage or Small Group Bible Study)

Many people struggle praying at all for any period of time, much less out loud or with a group. Many people have a variety of struggles with prayer. In our small group / bible study this week, we went through a very engaging intercession exercise.

While the exercise below was used during and in our married couple small group, going through it with your spouse would be wonderful. This exercise led our group in about 2 hours of communal prayer.

Prayer outside our contexts, cultures, and comforts creates an opportunity to move and focus our hearts on Christ in unique ways. Prayer for our local communities and world opens our minds to opportunities to “go and do”.

The Great Commission calls us to actively share our faith and the Gospel with people. The message of the Gospel is amazing, overwhelming, and somewhat offensive to many. Often, people are turned off by the reality of the messages of “sin” and repentance. Although we never need to apologize for Truth, these conversations can be uncomfortable, invite persecution, and cause conflict.

How will we ever be able to share our faith if we can’t even exercise spiritual disciplines in our comfortably safe churches and/or Bible studies?!?While praying aloud, praying on your knees, raising your hands, etc does not earn any kind of gold stars, you should definitely challenge your comfort against the realities of Christ and the Saints’ prayer lives in the Bible. […]

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Do I REALLY Believe in Hell? How Does Hell Change MY Life?

This post also assumes you who believes in the (not optional) doctrine of heaven and hell. Any teaching that suggests hell is not real, merely an “idea”, does not involve or require Jesus, not something a loving God would allow, etc… is wrong teaching. Hell is real. For anyone that may post a comment to the contrary, I probably will not engage in the conversation.

Truth exists outside of my or your opinions or beliefs. I definitely encourage you to review and pray over the sermon below. There will be many “good people” in hell.

If you and I really believe in hell…

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The Man Problem in America: Are You a Boy, a Man, or a “Ban”?

As men pursue and reflect Christ… families change… churches change… communities change… the world changes. Unfortunately, this is not reality… it is not happening. We have a morbidly disgusting man problem in America…

We recently started going through the new membership classes at our wonderfully awesome church. As part of this first of 12ish classes, the teacher emphasized the importance and absence of male leadership in the church.

He referenced a couple really compelling resources that I thought I would share with you…

Resource 1 – Statistics on how a father’s church attendance impacts whether his children attend church in adulthood.

Resource 2 – An excerpt from a book entitled Church Planter: The Man, the Message, the Mission by Darrin Matrick and Mark Driscoll on the unfortunate reality of how men in America waste their lives and resources while pursuing selfish indulgence.

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“No Strings Attached” – This Breaks My Heart … God Designed Sex Perfectly

The upcoming blockbuster movie “No Strings Attached” starring Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher, and Kevin Kline is based on the following plot: “A guy and girl try to keep their relationship strictly physical, but it’s not long before they learn that they want something more.”

Here are 3 other marketing slogans associated with “No Strings Attached”

  • Can two friends hook up without love getting in the way?
  • Welcome to the new world of relationships.
  • Can sex friends stay best friends?

Pardon my “Christian high horse”… but doesn’t this just break your heart? God had such an intentional and perfect design for sex…

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Visioneering by Andy Stanley – Defining & Executing a Vision for Your Marriage (Part 2 of 2)

In this post, Part 2 of 2, I share the conversation my amazing wife I had (and continue to have) as we discussed (and continue to discuss) our vision for our marriage and family. We sat down and brainstormed about the various routes we could pursue in the coming years. As we did that, we identified our vision for our marriage and family.

In order to execute this vision, there will be a plethora of tradeoffs. Nonetheless, we must resolve to stay focused on the dream, and choose to intentionally pursue, pray over, and serve it.

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