Faith

More God. Not More About God.

When I hear people talk about what is wrong with organized religion, or why their mainline churches are failing, I hear about bad music, inept clergy, mean congregations, and preoccupation with institutional maintenance. I almost never hear about the intellectualization of faith, which strikes me as a far greater danger than anything else on the [...]

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Migrating This Blog

Hey everyone – I’m grateful you’re reading this and that you’ve ever read anything from me here! In the next week or so, I’ll be moving all the posts and content from this site to a new location: claypotchronicles.com. That makes sense, huh?! Since I began blogging almost two years ago, I’ve always used the [...]

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Grace, Effort, Earning, and Spiritual Disciplines

Dallas Willard talks about the relationship between grace and spiritual disciplines. What a rich 5 minute discussion! If you make it at least to the 2:15 mark, you’ll hear this insightful, freeing nugget: Grace is not opposed to effort; it’s opposed to earning. Effort is action.  Earning is attitude. Something to ponder for awhile!  

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Doubtless

This morning I was meeting with a friend for prayer and we had a brief conversation about our various doubts and seasons in our lives where doubts (about God, about the authority of Scripture, etc.) have seemed to reign.  We closed our time by praying through Matthew 14:22-33, the story of Peter walking on water. [...]

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The Saving Life of Christ

There is something which makes Christianity more than a religion, more than an ethic, and more than the idle dream of the sentimental idealist.  It is this something which makes it relevant to each one of us right now as a contemporary experience.  It is the fact that Christ Himself is the very life content [...]

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Evangelism & Social Activism: On Eliminating the ‘&’

For too long, evangelism and social activism have been separated. Followers of Jesus are given the false impression they must choose to be involved with one or the other at a time. Jesus came with saving love for the whole world. He indwells the church, empowering us to be on mission with him, redeeming the [...]

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A New Way of Thinking About Spiritual Disciplines

There is a destructive cycle of spirituality where we begin with “doing,” or self-effort.  Then we link our sense of significance with our achievements.  I wrote about this in a post called, “Cycle of Grace.”  Here is one of the illustrations from that post: We have a choice in our lives.  We can begin with [...]

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Consumerism and the Church

I’m planning for a teaching a series in November on consumerism and the Christian faith.  The human desire for more, more, more creeps into our faith and then into our expectations of church … (more on that later!) Since I’ve been wrestling with these issues and trying to think through hard questions about our culture, [...]

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