By Tony Merida

In our gospel-centered movement, we should emphasize Paul’s pattern of preaching the grace of Christ. But we should also highlight his deep commitment to friendship.

Paul’s constant interaction with his friends was a sign of maturity, not deficiency. Even the mighty apostle needed friends—and he needed them for the same reasons you do.

Click here to read three simple but glorious benefits of friendship...

By Jennifer Phillips

Brian and I recently led a parenting workshop at our church. I’d like to think we were asked to teach this course because our mad parenting skillz are off the chart, but it may have more to do with the fact that we’re the only ones who said yes. Also, we’re one of the only couples in our church whose kids are over the age of five, so there’s that. BUT ANYWAY. I digress.
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We were given the freedom to choose from any parenting-related topic, and while it may have been easier to zero in on things like “Surviving on Little-to-No Sleep,” “How to Get Your Kids to Behave in Public,” or “How to Potty Train and Not Lose Your Mind,” we knew we wanted to zero in on the heart—and not so much our children’s hearts, but what parenting reveals about our hearts. We wanted to talk about idolatry.

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The bailing trend is an understandable byproduct of a busy culture.  But is it Christian?   
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My friend lives in Toronto’s hipster west end, I on the eastern edge of buttoned-up midtown. To see each other, especially when both of us are swamped with work and family commitments, we flex the muscle of careful planning and muster herculean effort. However, several weeks ago, we planned to meet rather spontaneously for coffee on a Monday. She would be in my neck of the woods.

For a fleeting moment, our friendship had the gratuitous gleam of convenience.

Then she moved our meeting spot 15 minutes further from my house.  The gleam faded, and I bailed.  "Today has run away from me," I texted the day before, "and I don't think I have time tomorrow for coffee. I'm sorry, because I'd love to see you.  

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If you are like me, you probably find yourself more consistently confused or failing in prayer than in any other area in the Christian life. Why is that? Talking to the God who chose us, saved us, and sustains us should be the most natural and delightful thing in the world, shouldn’t it? Perhaps it should, but more often than not, it isn’t.
We all know we should pray more. The guilt within reminds us. But if we are honest, we neither want to pray more, nor are we really convinced we need to. Why? Perhaps we don’t really understand what prayer is — or we’re prone to forget.

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How to ensure 'personal sustainability.' 

​In recent years, a number of Christian leaders have rightly called lethargic and half-hearted Christians to quicken their pace, to dedicate more of their time, talents, money and efforts to serving the Lord in the local church and in evangelistic outreach at home and abroad.  I welcome this “radical,” “don’t waste your life” message to up the pace, and I rejoice in its positive impact on thousands of Christians. Some of us, though, need to hear a different message: 

“Slow your pace or you’ll never finish the race.”

As Brady Boyd warns in Addicted to Busy, “Ultimately, every problem I see in every person I know is a problem of moving too fast for too long in too many aspects of life.”  I’m not proposing that we put our feet up and opt out of life and Christian service. No, I’m talking about being sensitive to changes in ourselves and our circumstances and re-calibrating our pace to ensure personal sustainability.

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"If this were 1999—the year that I was converted and walked away from the woman and lesbian community I loved—instead of 2016, Jen Hatmaker's words about the holiness of LGBT relationships would have flooded into my world like a balm of Gilead. How amazing it would have been to have someone as radiant, knowledgeable, humble, kind, and funny as Jen saying out loud what my heart was shouting: Yes, I can have Jesus and my girlfriend. Yes, I can flourish both in my tenured academic discipline (queer theory and English literature and culture) and in my church. My emotional vertigo could find normal once again.

Maybe I wouldn’t need to lose everything to have Jesus. Maybe the gospel wouldn’t ruin me while I waited, waited, waited for the Lord to build me back up after he convicted me of my sin, and I suffered the consequences. Maybe it would go differently for me than it did for Paul, Daniel, David, and Jeremiah. Maybe Jesus could save me without afflicting me. Maybe the Lord would give to me respectable crosses (Matt 16:24). Manageable thorns (2 Cor 12:7)."
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We know as Christians, on an intellectual level, that we have idols—be it family, food, football or whatever. But to see the allure of idolatry can be hard for those of us in the Western world.That’s why I appreciate the points laid out by Doug Stuart in his Exodus commentary (450-54). Stuart suggests nine reasons idolatry was attractive to the Israelites and in the cultures of the Ancient Near East.
1. It was guaranteed. If you do the right incantation, you get the right results. Just say the right words and the gods show up. Who wouldn’t want that?

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Every Christian must come to terms with the fact that there will indeed be a Man of Lawlessness and our beliefs about him will play a role in the way we think and live today.  

If you are interested in some basic information on the Anti-Christ you will find the list contained in this article, written by Matthew Holst at Alliancenet.org, informative.   

"One of the Apostle Paul’s great preoccupations in both of his letters to the church at Thessalonica is the second coming of Christ. He was not only concerned with getting the doctrine “right” but also with the great pastoral implications of such teaching.

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I was in an engineering class the first time I watched the tragic explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Even though I wasn’t alive when it happened, I caught a glimpse of the horror thousands must have felt as the events unfolded.

And, the first question everyone wanted to know was, “What happened?”

After months of investigation, here’s what the Rogers Commission (the group commissioned to investigate the explosion) discovered: an o-ring seal in the right solid rocket booster failed at take-off. I won’t bore you with the details, but an o-ring is a small device relative to the size of a space shuttle. Very small.

It wasn’t something huge, like a puncture in the rocket booster or a hole in the cabin, that caused this disaster. It was a small, seemingly insignificant, o-ring failure.

I think there’s a lesson here for the church. What if the big sins, you know the ones you try hardest to avoid, aren’t the greatest threat to your joy and the church’s mission?

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Joni Eareckson Tada has given us many books on the subject of God’s tender care for His children in times of suffering. Joni strikes the chord of authenticity with us so well because suffering is the world she lives in 24/7, literally. My personal favorite is When God Weeps: Why Our Sufferings Matter to the Almighty, co-authored with Steve Estes, a pastor in Pennsylvania. The following list of God’s purposes in our suffering is from one of the appendices in that book.

Take some time to meditate on the wisdom of God as He works out His perfect will through our suffering. No wonder James, the brother of our Lord, commanded us to “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials” (James 1:2)!

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