Instant obedience is the only kind of obedience there is; delayed obedience is disobedience. Whoever strives to withdraw from obedience, withdraws from Grace.
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That’s Not The Gospel.
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Announcements FAIL via ChurchMarketingSucks
Nothing in the history of Christendom, save perhaps the Second Crusade, rivals the ineffectiveness of the church’s ability to accomplish an intended purpose more than the medium of in-service announcements.
This article challenged me. Golden Grove and I stink at announcements. I am praying that this will be an area of improvement for us in 2012…
Read the whole article here!
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The American obsession with the second coming of Jesus — especially with distorted interpretations of it — continues unabated. Seen from my side of the Atlantic, the phenomenal success of the Left Behind books appears puzzling, even bizarre.
Few in the U.K. hold the belief on which the popular series of novels is based: that there will be a literal “rapture” in which believers will be snatched up to heaven, leaving empty cars crashing on freeways and kids coming home from school only to find that their parents have been taken to be with Jesus while they have been “left behind.”
This pseudo-theological version of Home Alone has reportedly frightened many children into some kind of (distorted) faith. This dramatic end-time scenario is based (wrongly, as we shall see) on Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, where he writes: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout of command, with the voice of an archangel and the trumpet of God. The dead in Christ will rise first; then we, who are left alive, will be snatched up with them on clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17).
What on earth (or in heaven) did Paul mean?
Read More by Clicking Here
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Herein is wonder of wonders: He came below to raise me above, was born like me that I might become like Him.
Herein is love; when I cannot rise to Him He draws near on wings of grace, to raise me to Himself.
Herein is power; when Deity and humanity were infinitely apart He united them in indissoluble unity, the uncreated and the created.
Herein is wisdom; when I was undone, with no will to return to Him, and no intellect to devise recovery, He came, God-incarnate, to save me to the uttermost, as man to die my death, to shed satisfying blood on my behalf, to work out a perfect righteousness for me.
O God, take me in spirit to the watchful shepherds, and enlarge my mind; let me hear good tidings of great joy, and hearing, believe, rejoice, praise, adore, my conscience bathed in an ocean of repose, my eyes lifted to a reconciled Father; place me with ox, ass, camel, goat, to look with them upon my Redeemer’s face, and in Him account myself delivered from sin; let me with Simeon clasp the new-born child to my heart, embrace Him with undying faith, exulting that He is mine and I am His. In Him Thou hast given me so much that heaven can give no more.
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Poor Batman… Christmas brings on his Seasonal Depression.
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Yummy.
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A church with no salvations is just a chapel.
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Even Siri is a Tar Heel fan! #GoHeels!
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Agreed.
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