Ministry Lessons from the Life of Eugene Peterson | CT Pastors | Christianity Today
— Read on www.christianitytoday.com/pastors/2018/october-web-exclusives/ministry-lessons-from-life-of-eugene-peterson.html

The Testimony of Doyle Robinson, Co-Founder of Sox Place and U.S. missionary.
— Read on usmissions.ag.org/en/News/USMissions/A-Father-to-the-Fatherless

This is the whole of Christianity. There is nothing else. It is so easy to get muddled about that. It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects—education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects—military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden—that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.

— from Mere Christianity

The very word membership is of Christian origin, but it has been taken over by the world and emptied of all meaning. In any book on logic you may see the expression “members of a class.” It must be most emphatically stated that the items or particulars included in a homogeneous class are almost the reverse of what St. Paul meant by members. By members. . . .he meant what we should call organs, things essentially different from, and complementary to, one another, things differing not only in structure and function but also in dignity. . . . . How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic sense), precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable. Each person is almost a species in himself. The mother is not simply a different person from the daughter; she is a different kind of person. The grown-up brother is not simply one unit in the class children; he is a separate estate of the realm. The father and grandfather are almost as different as the cat and the dog. If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure. Its unity is a unity of unlikes, almost of incommensurables.

A dim perception of the richness inherent in this kind of unity is one reason why we enjoy a book like The Wind in the Willows; a trio such as Rat, Mole, and Badger symbolises the extreme differentiation of persons in harmonious union, which we know intuitively to be our true refuge both from solitude and from the collective.

—from “Membership” (C. S. Lewis – The Weight of Glory)

medium.com/inc./sheryl-sandberg-just-admitted-the-real-lesson-of-facebooks-business-model-and-it-should-scare-e99e5ff4f4e2

Pastor and Acts 29 president Matt Chandler wants people to know the key to sharing their faith in the 21st century. Hint: It does not involve throwing one’s Bible at non-Christians.
— Read on relevantmagazine.com/god/matt-chandler-4-ways-christians-share-faith-actually-effective/

Full Service – Easter 2018: Just Getting Started from Red Rocks Church Services on Vimeo.

This is a post from Jack Deere’s Blog

Jack’s Blog

If I can’t find my ultimate joy in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, it is unlikely that will find joy in anything.

I have learned this the hard way.

Once my hope for happiness was in legal sex and a perfect marriage. I was young and foolish. Movies determined more of my theology than I realized. I did not know perfect does not exist on earth. Then I thought we’d be happy if we owned home. Then the next home and the next home until we came to the perfect home on a mountain in Montana. That home was so great that I thanked God for it all the time. Then I found my boy dead in that home and neither he nor I would ever spend another night there.

After Leesa and I lost Scott we went into a cave. After a little while, I found Jesus in the cave with us. I think he had been there all along, waiting for me to notice him. So that is where we met for a long time, in a cave. I did not see any significance in meeting him in the cave. Just a fact of life for us now. Then a few years or so ago, on the way out of the cave, I saw its significance.

My basic prayer for the last the 20 years has been that God would grant me the honor of becoming a best friend of His Son. I had forgotten that Jesus had sent his original best friend, the Apostle John, to live in a cave on the Island of Patmos. He exiled John to a lonely cave in his old age. And then Jesus came to John in the cave and gave him the revelation that has given all his little ones faith and courage to fight the good fight for the last two thousand years.

One day Jesus will come back and make all the wrong things right, and for a few years of temporal faithfulness Jesus will give us an eternal reward so great that it can’t be described or imagined with our present earthbound language. That’s what John saw in the cave. And now I think that Jesus sends all his best friends into a cave for some period of their lives. Maybe more than once. And the cave is where they learn that the pain of this life, no matter how severe or complicated or unfair, is ultimately an invitation to the party we’ve all been looking for down here, but have never found. So today, I’m trying to fight the good and great fight by looking forward to the party that will never end.

Love,

Jack

I sat and talked with my friend Eric Metaxas a few weeks ago about Even In Our Darkness. Our conversation turned into a 3 part interview that will air on The Eric Metaxas Show.

You can listen to the first part here and the second part here. I’ll let you know on my Facebook page when the final part airs.

I’m slowly reading through all the comments and messages so many have left on my Facebook page and email account. Thank you for your kind words about the book. I’m so glad that God is answering my prayer that the book be used to bring people into a deeper friendship with Jesus.

Thank you, too, if you have reviewed the book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere; it really helps continue to spread the word. I am humbly grateful.