Articles I write for the weekly bulletin of the East Main Church of Christ, the congregation where I preach.
But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. John 4:23-24 While talking with Jesus at Jacob’s well, the Samaritan… Read More Worship in Spirit and Truth
Abraham spoke of the act of worship in a way that implies that it had a beginning and an ending. He basically told his servants that he and Isaac would travel to the mountain in Moriah, start to worship, and then return when they had completed their worship. If God had wished for Abraham to continually worship Him for every moment of every day, it would have been superfluous and contradictory for Abraham to speak of his plans to worship at the mountain because he would have been worshiping already. Indeed, he would have somehow been worshiping God while simultaneously talking to his servants about his travel plans. … Read More Must All of Life Be Worship?
Our children will have received around 16,800 hours of secular education in 12 years by going to school 7 hours a day, five days a week, 10 months out of the year. This will help them get ahead in this world…but then they will leave this world. Will they be prepared for the next? Not if we give them only 1-4 hours a week of spiritual education in the church building. 12 years of that will give them only 1,248 hours of biblical doctrine before they leave the nest. Statistically, many children these days leave the church never to return once they leave the home. There’s a reason for that.… Read More The Importance of a Spiritual Education
By growing stronger spiritually, Paul told the Ephesians that they would “attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God.” He told them they would become “mature” and reach “the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.” In other words, they would grow more complete spiritually as they became more united by the faith and knowledge of Jesus which comes only from learning and obeying Scripture, and thus have a portion of the spiritual adulthood (“the measure of the stature”) which God wishes for His Son’s church (“the fullness of Christ,” cf. Eph. 1:22-23). The same can be true of us here at East Main. … Read More Equipping the Saints for the Work of Service
