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Showing posts from May, 2021

Loving Christ When Obedience Costs

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by Bart Denny Most of us don’t struggle to admire Jesus. Who wouldn’t admire His courage, His wisdom, and the way He held truth and love together? Who wouldn’t admire His compassion, His purity, and His strength? That’s not usually where the struggle begins. The struggle begins when what Jesus commands conflicts with what we want. It begins when obedience costs us something we’d rather keep, our comfort, our approval, our control, our preferred timeline, or our pride. That’s where John 14:15–21 lands with unusual force. Here, we come to a passage where Jesus makes something painfully clear: loving Him means  more than admiring Him. It means obeying Him when obedience gets expensive, relying on the Spirit He gives, and trusting that He won’t leave us alone. And that is a word many of us need to hear. Loving Jesus feels wonderful... until obedience gets expensive.  This passage isn’t mainly aimed at people who hate Jesus. It’s aimed at people who really do ...
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"People just don't want to come to church anymore!" The Last Words of a Dying Church

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 Lately, I've had the opportunity to observe some dying churches, and to talk to people about the increasing problem of church decline and death. I know many dying organizations subscribe to the mantra, "We've never done it that way before." But, in the case of churches, it assumes that at least someone  in the organization is trying to turn things around.  Why does no one show up for worship on Sundays? Because "no one wants to come to church anymore." It's actually an answer that I heard before COVID, but the pandemic seems to reinforce that line of thinking. And I understand that cultural Christianity is dead. There is no societal expectation that people show up for church just because that's what "respectable" people do. That should be a win. Do we really want unregenerate people in church leadership? But it does cut into the numbers, especially for churches that don't really have much to offer by way of authentic community, vibrant...
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