Posts from 2015 (Page 8)

Giving Ourselves as Gifts: Be Bold

In normal conversation, there are some things that are easy to talk about. We can bring up school, or work, or family and friends, or any recreational activities we’re involved with. We might even mention what church we go to. However, there’s one thing we rarely talk about, and that’s our faith. We have this…

The Gift of God: You Are Witnesses

When I was a senior on my high school track team, our coach came up with this theme for the season: “U Inspired?” The “U” represented my school, Urbandale, and also the pronoun “you,” to indicate that each of us should be inspired. The idea was that we would run faster, jump better, and throw…

GIFTED: The Light of Faith

Thomas gets a bad rap. Commonly referred to as “Doubting Thomas,” he claims that he needs to see and touch Jesus before he would be willing to believe that Jesus is alive. But how different are we from Thomas? After all, it’s pretty hard to believe that Jesus is alive sometimes. We haven’t seen him,…

What do we believe about membership?

This Sunday we celebrated our newest members, Larry and Julie. And it might have brought up a question for you, what does “membership” mean? The reason that churches have “members” comes from Paul’s equation of “people in the church” with “members of the body of Christ”. You can find Paul writing about this in I…

The Gift of God: Light

You never know what you’ve got until it’s gone. That was certainly true for me one morning. I had just gotten out of the shower, and I was drying my hair. My towel was over my head and my eyes were closed. When I finished drying my hair and took the towel away, I opened…

GIFTED: GO! It’s Urgent!

The week before school starts at Florida State is what we commonly refer to as “Go Week.” We spend a lot of time running: running to and from the Baptist Collegiate Ministry center where we cook the meals, running to and from the dorms where we’re helping students move in, running to and from Sam’s…

What do we believe about choice?

This past Sunday, I repeated the term “Choose Life” a bunch of times because it fit with where I was going with the sermon for Easter – that we make choices about what we reject as “unlife” so that we can have a more pure experience of “Life-life”. But when it comes to our choices,…