A Blog for MSBC Family

Some may be interested in our church family blog that will be run by the pastoral team. One feature that we are going to try to maintain is what we call the “Liturgy Page.” This will give a program for the coming Sunday (or past Sunday depending on when you view it) with explanation and links to songs, etc.

Church Membership is Vital

Any charlatan can say, “I have submitted to Christ’s rule.” Yet submission is so anathema and counter-intuitive to our fallen natures that we can easily deceive ourselves into thinking we have submitted to him when we haven’t.  How easy it is to say the words, “Christ is Lord,” but to do them is a different matter altogether.  The authoritative structures of the local church provide the professing Christian with the opportunity to do those words, “Christ is Lord.”

Jonathan Leeman, The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline, p. 160

Pay Your Taxes

Collin Hansen is doing us all a great service by pointing us to a message by Mark Dever. But if you want the Cliff notes, read Collin’s article. Words that come to my mind: Outstanding. Timely. Necessary. Important.

Productivity

Here’s a short but insightful post on productivity.

Should I blog?

A friend who is also a pastor recently asked his Facebook friends if he should blog, wondering aloud if anyone would read it. This is what I said:

I rarely read blogs. And I suspect most readers of my blog are like I am. I have a gazilion blogs on my feed and IF the topic interests me, I read. So, my response to your question about whether or not I would read your blog is a definite and solid “Sometimes I will and sometimes I won’t!” Therefore, I urgently and enthusiastically encourage you to start blogging. If you don’t, I’ll never have the option to NOT read it!

The Gospel in Bed

*This post written some time ago was one of the most popular from my old blog. I’m still rejoicing in salvation!

I’ve experienced Gospel power in bed. If you’re bold enough, read on.

It took me years to get used to sleeping with somebody. I’m a Type A driver, hard-wired to push hard, work late, and sleep little; and beset with a sin of self-love that still lurks within my un-chiseled forty-year-old bod. For reasons unknown to me, except that perhaps God may have designed it for my sanctification, I am one of the world’s lightest sleepers and, once awakened, wide-eyed for hours. People who sleep hard used to tick me off.

My wife sleeps hard.

Floorology

Yesterday I was trying to teach my class of 9th graders the effect of the objective and the subjective in counseling. In order to do it we came up with our own religion: floorology.

Floorology, as you might suspect, is about floors. The Grand Masters of this Religion decided on some axioms that would govern our understanding of floors and represent Floorology. A few were as follows:

The floor is foundational. You can stand on it.
The floor is solid.
The floor is beneath us. If you are standing on the floor you cannot be under it.

I then proceed to seek their counsel as a person who strongly feels that the floor is going to fall from beneath me. Hanging on to the white board for dear life I told them that the floor was falling beneath me and that I would not let go of the board. When I was told that this simply was not true, I became angry and accused them of calling me a liar. I accused my 9th graders of calling me a liar because they told me that the objective facts of floorology should govern my thinking and it simply was not true that I needed to be afraid and hang onto the whiteboard. But I insisted that I was not lying.

Only one immediately grasped the problem. I was rejecting the truth of their claims because of the trueness of my feelings.I was accusing them of accusing me of lying when, in fact, they were not accusing me a any such thing. They were only accusing me of being wrong. I indeed was telling the truth about my feelings, but my feelings were not representing the truth. My feelings were true (in that they were real) but they were not truth. The Wise 9th Grade Floorologist said, “Your feelings may be real about the floor caving in, but you’re crazy!”

Too many Christians cannot distinguish the difference between “My feelings are true” and “My feelings are truth.” Thus they get offended when they are told that they have misplaced feelings. They feeling like their character is being maligned. But they imagine more than actually is. We are not saying that they are lying. We are saying they are wrong. They cannot distinguish between the reality of what they feel and truth. Some Floorologist counselors that are NANC certified try to deal with the problem by saying, “You’re feelings are a lie. The only reality is the reality of objective truth.” The problem however is that both the Objective and the Subjective are real. Only the Objective can be Truth. The Subjective can be either true to Truth or true to a lie. But it’s still true.