JOEL 2 GENERATION

There are simply so many verses that teach us that with God all things are possible. There is no challenge, no trial, no struggle, no addiction, no pain, no challenge or fear that we are unable to face and to endure and overcome - why? Because of the God Factor . One of those verses jumped out at me this morning. And sadly, due to the way Calvinists have misused this verse, I have probably avoided it. That is another topic but the Calvinist doctrine of Total Depravity (which to them means utter and total inability and deadness - think Luther's, The Bondage of the Will ), causes Reformed Christians to misread much of their New Testaments. But to get back to today's blog post, the verse I am referring to is Philippians 2:13: "...for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." This might be one of the most encouraging verses in the entire New Testament when we think about its implications in the life of a believer. We know that when we ar...

Today, I was missing the Middle East and wanted to go and meet people from the Arab World. Many Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula visit where we live during the summer, and I went to a well-known mall today to see if any of them had started to arrive. It ended up being a bit too early and I literally did not see any Arabs (and listening carefully heard no Arabic being spoken). I thought I had "struck out" but then had one last coffee shop in mind that I would pass by on my way home. And God let me find there what I was looking for! Standing behind me was a man that I knew was Middle Eastern. When I asked where he was from, he was from the country I had been living in for the last 13 years before we moved back to America. It was like I had run into an old friend. I sat with he and his wife for more than 30 minutes as we talked about many things. I got to pray for my new friend as he had some back pain. We exchanged numbers and will meet again soon. Before I left I went back t...

We just got back from nearly one month in the Middle East. I wouldn't know where to begin in terms of trying to document the miraculous things that happened. Many were prayed for, and of those, many testified to pain leaving their bodies. Often the prayer was preceded by a word of knowledge indicating what the precise problem was. I am thinking of a Saudi Arabian Muslim man we met in his country. My buddy got a word of knowledge for him about a problem he had in his right hand/thumb. He had the problem. We prayed for him in Arabic and he was healed. This led to a longer conversation with him by another Arab believer (on my phone) who prayed for him and shared with him the Gospel.  We saw a couple of people give their lives to Christ - one of them we baptized shortly thereafter with her husband who also only recently gave his life to Christ. Both of them were Muslims who are now following Christ.  We got pray for people who needed to be set free from demonic oppression. And we ...

Such powerful words from one of the lines in the famous Keith Green song, "Make My Life A Prayer to You" (1978) -  LINK This song changed my life - I became a Christian in January 1984 which I just realized was just over 40 years ago. I listened to Punk Rock and New Wave Music. (and thankfully, there were Christian bands like Undercover, The Altar Boys and the Lifesavers that played music that I liked!) What prompted me to write the post has been a recent barrage of Christians and even those considered "leaders" in the Body of Christ advocating, posting about and modeling incredible compromise in their lives - from addiction to alcohol, to immodesty, to the use the foulest language, to unBiblical divorces and remarriages. I am also thinking of men and women who had held to Biblical truth who today believe and teach not only false doctrines but even heresy. I think of others who have abandoned their faith altogether.  I am sure back in 1984, Christians were living th...

I've entitled this blog post after the name of a fairly well-known Christian book written by Wayne Jacobsen and Dave Coleman that came out back in 2008.  I listened to Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings for several years when they were doing "The God Journey" podcast together.  At the time I was listening to the podcast, I heard a lot of reasons that people were leaving churches. I heard about different levels of abuse, control and manipulation. A lot more of these dynamics are coming to light and clearly the Lord is doing something across the Body of Christ to expose and reveal many unhealthy dynamics in churches and ministries. For reasons I've detailed elsewhere, the Lord led my wife and I clearly in the direction of house (or house-sized) churches which we had been leading for many years, and are now almost exclusively focusing on. I've written about our journey in these blog posts: "Houses of Fire - A Strategy to Bring in the Harvest" -  LINK "H...

I had a convicting thought (thoughts) as I was re-reading Philippians over the past few days. After my message last week on "Death to Self and Living a Life of Humility"  LINK , I had to go back and edit the message (deleting stuff) and adding an Addendum at the end (about 12 minutes) explaining how I let the "sin in others become the sin in me" (to use use a well-known expression from Dan Mohler). While comparing and contrasting the lives of Kanye West and the Catholic nun Cabrini in an appropriate way I believe, I kept going and started naming some other names and being hyper-critical of other ministers and ministries. And it wasn't/isn't that the points I was making about these other ministries wasn't/isn't true. It was that I was NOT speaking about their errors/excesses in the right way. While criticizing their self-exaltation, I was doing so with an elite spirit (PRIDE), all during a sermon on the topic of dying to self and humility. Ugly stuff....

  I wonder if Kanye got the correct "Sign-Up Sheet" when he professed his Christian faith back in 2019. He surely doesn't understand Christianity in 2024. The Catholic nun Cabrini (1850-1917) did get the Biblical "Sign-Up Sheet" and lived a life of radical surrender. The recent movie about her life is a MUST SEE and will inspire any who watch it! No two Christians could be more different than Kanye and Cabrini. Many Christians today are not getting the original "Memo" that Jesus and His Apostle gave to people in the 1st century.  In this podcast, I talk about these foundational Christian teachings/foundations. The Christian life begins with us dying to ourselves and proceeds with a focus on humility before God and towards one another.  LISTEN HERE https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/joel2generation/episodes/2024-04-07T10_40_24-07_00  #deathtoself #selfdeath #humility #kanye #cabrini #kanyewest #francescabrini