Have you ever had a bad substitute teacher? I recall hearing about one at my high school. He was a fairly regular substitute until one day, he was talking to one of my classmates who was going through a hard time. He supposedly told her that she would be better off committing suicide. This was…
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Church Blog (Page 54)
I have some friends who refuse to watch the news. They say it’s because it’s too depressing and violent. They come away after watching the news with a sense that there is nothing good in the world, because the reporters only talk about the bad things while ignoring the good things. This reminds me of…
Ask anyone who studies communication and they will tell you that “non-verbal communication” is important. One theorist (Albert Mehrabian) thinks that non verbals comprise up to 93% of the component parts of all personally communicated messages. Hand gestures and tone of voice are key, as well as facial expression and body posture. Similarly, in the…
“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are,” begins 1st John 3. “The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.” We can see the love of the Father all around us. We…
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…
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…
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,…
The title for Psalm 148 is “Praise the Name of the Lord.” The word “praise” is mentioned 13 times in the 14 verses of the Psalm. The Psalmist has a very clear message for us. He wants us to praise the Lord! As Christians, we know of many reasons to praise the Lord, both past,…
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…
No one can deny the fact that we live in a dark world. It’s scary out there, and we in the church have a tendency to huddle together and stay inside. But our world doesn’t have to stay dark. Picture a dark room. It’s pitch black, until one person lights a candle. Then that person…