I have finally identified one of the core issues to my walk with Jesus Christ – driving in the right lane. Try it for a week. Okay, a day. Then try driving in the right lane and do nothing else but drive. No radio, phone calls, tapes, etc. It is a Sabbath activity for me and has been for some time. It is exhilarating. But I have not not been able to integrate this into my work week. Why? It is deep, I suspect. Very deep. Ruthlessly eliminating hurry (Dallas Willard’s famous phrase to John Ortberg) captures what, I believe, is one of our critical issues as followers of Christ in our culture. In New York City we are famous for finishing people’s sentences, speeding to red lights, fighting for a seat on a subway or bus, and “attitude.” Traveling around North America, however, has shown me that we don’t have a patent on the problem. Multitasking, continuous partial attention, and trying to. Read more.
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I receive e mails regularly from people who are troubled that I am quoting and learning from people who do not have a solid evangelical theology, who might be universalists, or tend towards a works-righteousness, or pray to saints. The following are a few points to consider to help us remain humble and teachable as we seek to listen to God. Firstly, many of our great evangelical heroes also appeared to have some large holes in their theological armor. Consider Jonathan Edwards who owned slaves like his father before him and even defended the practice, arguing the colonies were dependent on it. (However, he also was the first pastor in Northampton to baptize “negroes” and admit them into full membership.) John Calvin endorsed the drowning of an Anabaptist, that is a fellow-believer who believed in baptism by immersion for believers alone! Martin Luther was an anti-Semite. Hitler quoted those portions of his writings. CT. Read more.
For the past few weeks I have been reading, pondering and praying about what integrity actually is. Consider this definition : Integrity is when who I am on-stage is the same as who I am back-stage. It is when there is no separation between what is going on inside of me and what I am expressing outside of me. There is no separation of my inner and outer life. Easier said than done! I realize how easy it is for me to get so concerned with what is going on outside of me (my activity) that I lose touch with my soul. There becomes a gap between the inner ground, the center, my values and beliefs, my being and the actual life I am living. I can easily preach and write things I am not living!! To live congruent and internally consistent is difficult. This is integrity! This is what Parker Palmer has called. Read more.
I am in the process of finishing a Daily Office book that I have been working on since last Fall. It is going to the printer within 2 weeks and I recently made a change in one of the Offices (there are two per day, five days a week for eight weeks and are based on the themes from the workbook/book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality). One final change I made was to replace a devotional from one of the Offices to the one from Leighton’s Ford excellent new book that was recently published: The Attentive Life: Discerning God’s Presence in All Things (IVP, 2008). The book is filled with insights and learnings from his 76 years as a follower of Christ. I highly recommend it. He has been a personal mentor of mine for over 25 years. Geri, in fact, is with him now in North Carolina for 4 days on a spiritual mentoring retreat.. Read more.
I spent my first fifteen years as a Christian studying and absorbing some of the best books and materials around the subject of spiritual warfare. I have encountered demons in Sunday services and in one-to -one sessions. I have sat under people deep into the field of deliverance. Yes, we have plenty of material here about demons from our years here at New Life in Queens, NYC. Yet something was deeply wrong — with me. In some ways, an imbalanced understanding of warfare (powerful and true discipleship paradigm as it is), only reinforced some of my immature, unhealthy behaviors rather than liberate me for Christ. So as I approached Ephesians 6 on the armor of God to preach on it, I wanted to do one sermon on it and move on. I could not imagine what I would say with all the pathology and craziness that goes on around it in the church. (That is the great. Read more.
The greatest richness and learning that comes out of us learning church history, especially early church history, is the perspective it gives us on the North American church. This leads me to the next few lessons. The first relates to the state of the church today in light of history. One twenty two year old in our church put it well: “I had no idea how weak we as the church in America are until I heard/saw all this.” This came out of listening to the purifying effect of the persecutions up to 311 ad where Christians experienced 129 years of persecution and only 120 years of relative peace. This eliminated any notion of half-way, nominal Christians rather quickly. Christianity is an Asian religion with rich African roots, not Western. They continually moved Eastward in their mission. Who knew there were three “Christian kingdoms” in Asia before the Roman Empire. One seminary alone, in. Read more.
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