Discipleship/Spiritual Formation
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As I looked ahead this past week to 2015 and went through some good questions that help set up the next part of my journey, the one thing that kept showing up was the deep need for fasting and prayer. The engine to drive all that lies before me in 2015 is fasting and prayer. The… Read more
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As a pastor, the temptation is huge to “fix” people. They have a problem. They lay it out to you. You fix it. It is incredibly interesting to me that Jesus never “fixed” Peter. He let Peter know that Satan had asked permission to sift him as wheat, and Jesus said he would PRAY for… Read more
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Reading through the tribute to Dallas Willard, Todd Hunter points out a saying of Dallas I have loved. Hunter puts it this way: “…’one thing is for sure,’ Dallas wrote, ‘you are somebody’s disciple. You (are learning) how to live form somebody else. There are no exceptions to this rule.’” I remember Dallas saying something… Read more
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Scot McKnight gives some excerpts from an author named Andrew Root on the use of Bonhoeffer with youth. Root recommends taking some of Bonhoeffer’s essential ideas and utilizing them in discipling youth. (More HERE) He also gives a sober warning: It is possible that much of North American youth ministry is actually the perpetuation of… Read more
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When you preach through the Bible with a systematic style of having the text in front of you, those really tough places will pop up from time to time. Eventually, you get to passage you’d rather skip over. 1 Thess. 4 is one of those places. Paul won’t avoid it. Neither should we. And my… Read more
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I am reading Transforming Discipleship: Making disciples a few at a time by Greg Ogden. We have been developing this thought for training leaders in our church. We want intentional leadership not mass produced in a classroom. Small groups and one on one develop disciples in a stronger way. But it is a decision to… Read more
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An extension of the interview with Gary Black, Jr., over at BibleGateway included this blurb from his just released book: What is important to understand here is that there is no “then” or “when” to the kingdom of God. This reign is a current, progressing, maturing reality, which means Jesus rules today. Jesus is the… Read more
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Gary Black, Jr. has co-authored a continuation of The Divine Conspiracy with Dallas Willard, finishing it off after the passing of Dallas. Biblegateway has this interview with Gary Black, Jr. The new book is now out. I hope to have it in the near future. Explaining the title and what “conspiracy” means, Black had this to say:… Read more
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We are a culture given to extremes. Rather than living in the balances of feasting and fasting, we go to the extremes of obesity and anorexia. That is not just concerning food. And we highlight the extremes in our culture, wildly cheering one side or wildly despairing over the other extreme. We don’t like the… Read more
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“It may be that(God) has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we are.” — G.K. Chesteron, Orthodoxy Read more
Apprentice 2 Jesus 