Whew. The opening page of John Piper's Seeing And Savoring Jesus Christ. Heavy, mind-boggling, soul-stretching stuff, and I for one am grateful to have the chance to read it. Now Dr. Piper doesn't just love Wesleyan-Arminians, but we have so much to learn from his...
One day awhile back, I looked out the front door of our church and saw a man whom I did not know using his smart phone to take pictures of our facility. I was immediately alarmed. Is he casing us out so that he can break in and rob us later? Plotting an attack of...
How do you fit insights from the latest Great American Novel, the recovery community, Psalm 37, and some wordsmithing around "explanation & excuses" all into the opening message a series called Love Handles? Well the result is below. I knew from reading Nathan...
Love Handles Some of us have them. Some of us hold them. Some of us want to get rid of them. They’re love handles. But they’re actually more than a part of our mid-section. They’re the source of a question: do you have a handle on love? Romantic love? Family...
I've got to confess something this morning. No, it's not that. Lord knows, there's enough folks already caught up in that these days. No my confession is this: when people talk about leadership and bible and church in the same sentence, I usually respond with an eye...
A number of people at Good Shepherd for whom I have the greatest respect share a common characteristic: they have an exalted view of Christ. In academic terms, they have a high "Christology" -- doctrine of Christ. For example, one of my Good Shepherd friends will...
A few years ago, I repented of my attempts to be cool. At that time, I'd led Good Shepherd to have a "church crush" on a large congregation in the northern part of the US, and so for a season we tried to mimic much of what that church did. And that church was cool....
Seven worship gatherings. Multiple baptisms. One Savior. Here's what's ahead: Good Friday Service -- 7 p.m. tonight in the Moss Road Worship Center. We'll sing. We'll pray. Wayne Hobson will preach. We'll celebrate the Lord's Supper on the day that embodies what the...
Not long ago, in the middle of a conversation about how to design sermons, an attorney friend of mine chimed in with the oft-repeated mantra: Tell them what you're going to tell them. Tell them. Tell them what you told them. We learned that pattern in writing middle...
We preachers often find ourselves in the midst of a quest for sermon outlines. Many of us think if we can just find the right outline, the right scaffolding from which to build the rest of the message, then everything else will fall in place. In fact, as Easter...