…Increasingly the culture doesn’t believe in facts or truth. It believes that people create their own truth, they create their own facts. There’s no certainty on what the right take on reality is. And so here we have the Christian church of all things being the center of emphasis on the idea that there are historical facts that can be verified.
As I began to go into shock, I heard a shot close by and felt a body collapse on top of me. Blood ran over me, and I tried to crawl out from underneath it. When I got free, I looked back and could see it was an old man who the police had killed. Then I passed out. When word of the violence spread, my relatives raced to every clinic and hospital searching for me (Xolani had made it out ok). They couldn’t find me, and assumed I’d been killed.
In Philippians 1:9-11, Paul tells us his prayer is that “Your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ – to the glory and praise of God.” We can only imagine how different our work will be if we see it as a place where our experience of the gospel makes us more loving to our neighbors in and through our work.
Whether it is washing dishes or building spaceships, we have the image of God in us as ones who bring order out of chaos and call it good. In giving us his creation mandate, God asked men and women to discover the potential in his creation and care for it. With the publication The Creator in You, this message has been clearly and attractively presented to children.
Pastors and ministry leaders carry a heavy weight when caring for the needs of so many people in their congregation and surrounding community.
Like many New Yorkers, I lived (and often still live) from a place of unhealthy reliance on my work as a source of my identity, rather than as a healthy expression of it. So I went through a process of relearning to hold my identity (lower-case i) as a performing artist in New York much more loosely in particular. I had to hold that gift out to God and say “Lord, use this gift (and me) as it seems best to you.”
The pandemic is giving pastors, ministry leaders, and mental health professionals a crash course in how much mental health matters. Isolation and quarantine have a negative effect on people’s minds and bodies. National reports from the CDC say that demand for mental health care has tripled since March 2020. People who spend a great deal of their time caring for others are particularly vulnerable to burnout.
In this video, Tim Keller looks at how the Good Samaritan points us to Christ and the story compels us to live with radical, transformative love for our neighbors no matter what they believe or how different they may be from us.
When I was a young new lawyer, I was often asked by older adults in the church how I expected to work in that profession and be a Christian completely committed to the Lord. My answer was simple. I could surely serve God in any profession. I never gave the question much thought. Now as a much older Christian lawyer I wish I had.
I had been born and raised in Nigeria to Nigerian and Northern Irish parents, and because of the CG’s location I was hopeful this group might have some Black people in it, though I saw very few on Sundays. When I joined my CG, I was amazed, for God had led me to a CG that was part of the then Racial Unity Ministry (RUM).