Q – What is a woman’s role in the church?

We are going to spend two Sunday’s on this question. Today we are going to look at the background of this question so we understand it better. Next Sunday we will move into it “head on”.

Culture has always been a dominating force that bends us and twists us and molds us into the image of what it understands to be acceptable, and noble, and admirable, and helpful, and right and wrong. Culture is VERY powerful – it can actually creates the way we think. Cultural norms develop as its people change – the people, in turn, create the culture. Whatever “drives” the people creates the culture. If sin and self drive the people, sin and self will flow through the culture and the culture they create will magnify sin and self. Read the rest of this entry »

Q. – What is the place of the church in politics? Where do we draw the line between submitting to government and following God?

My first point - Those who follow Jesus DO NOT, or at least SHOULD NOT, function as if this country and this culture has an authoritative claim on their identity and their ultimate loyalty. Our identity is tied to the One who gives us life. Our identity is tied to the One who trumps any earthly bloodline… and this is not our home. Read the rest of this entry »

From eternity past that bloody day two thousand years ago was fixed. That singular day when humanity would show up focused and ready to go. That singular day when the people God created to live under his kind and generous hand would display who we had become. That singular day when, what we had been formulating for millennia, would finally move on the One who stood in our way. “If we can just pull it together and get this done we can finally be free.” That’s how dead people talk.

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Perhaps God’s dominant attribute, if there is such a thing, is his holiness.

Isaiah 6:3 (NIV) – Isaiah’s vision of the heavenly court
And [angles] were calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

God being holy means that God is completely separate from anything that is not perfect. God cannot look on sin, God will not accommodate sin, sin unleashes the consuming wrath of God. I am a horribly, willfully sinful person. Conclusion – I am destine to face the consuming wrath of God – end of story. No matter how desperate I am, I have no solution to this. Read the rest of this entry »

Q – God basically commits genocide in the Old Testament. For a God that doesn’t change, why does there seem to be such a discrepancy in his behavior between the Old Testament and the New Testament?

If we do not understand the wrath of God, if we don’t get this, and we at best will be nominal Christians. Read the rest of this entry »