Five Stages of Spiritual Transformation

Cape May, New Jersey

God can change human hearts. He is able, and desires, to transform (Rom. 12:2 - meta-morphe) our hearts into increasing Christlikeness (Gal. 4:9).

Since 1977 I have been developing my theory of spiritual transformation, which is about How God Changes People. The inputs for my theory of spiritual transformation have been and are:

1. The countless hours, over forty-plus years, that I have gone alone to a quiet place and prayed.

2. My ongoing saturation in the Christian scriptures, studying and meditating on them.

3. The 3500+ pastors, Christian leaders, seminary students, and lay people I have been privileged to spiritually mentor and coach through class lectures, dialogue, and the submission of their spiritual journals for me to respond to.

4. My past and ongoing study of the history of Christian spirituality.

My theory can be applied not only to the issue of spiritual transformation, but also to the ideas of spiritual “renewal,” “restoration,” “renovation,” and “formation.” All these concepts have to do with “change,” and in Christian spirituality change is good, stasis is bad.  

Spiritually, to not be growing is to be dying. As my friend Jim Hunter has said, “We’re either green and growing, or ripe and rotting.” 

Or, as Robert Quinn has written, it’s either “deep change” or “slow death.”

My approach to spiritual formation (I use “formation” and “transformation” interchangeably) applies and works cross-culturally, cross-temporally (concerning both old and young; and past, present, and future), and with both men and women. This is because the locus of spiritual formation is “the heart.” Thus, change and renewal happen at a deep, ontological level. Because the deeper we go inside persons the more we are all the same, the principles of Christian spiritual formation speak to everyone, everywhere. 

This is my experience over the years as I have been privileged to teach this material to Chinese pastors and leaders in Singapore New York City, and Vancouver, to Indians in India, to African Americans at Payne Theological Seminary, Palmer Theological Seminary, and Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, to African pastors (Kenyan and Ugandan) in Kenya, and to hundreds of Anglo pastors and Christian leaders from the U.S., in Canada, and beyond. In my seminary classes, I have taught this material to pastors and seminary students from every continent and, it seems, representing most of this world’s countries. All this interaction and input has served to help me refine my teachings, reducing them to the following points.

How does God change a human heart? Here is a what I call A Phenomenology of Spiritual Renewal and Transformation; viz., a description of what I see happening when lives are renewed and transformed in Christ.

1 – THE NEED (Recognize how needy you are)

Without this step growth will not occur. To recognize one’s own neediness is to be in a very good place, spiritually. Isaiah 6 serves us well here. Isaiah, who is arguably the most righteous person among the people of Israel, enters the temple and sees a vision of a holy God. The result is that Isaiah is “undone,” or “unraveled,” or “dis-integrated.” There is a huge gap between the holy-otherness of God and Isaiah with his dirty mouth.

To recognize, to internalize, the gap between self and God is crucial to one’s inner change.

2 – THE GAP (Understand the magnitude of the needed transformation)

The Jesus-idea is that God wants to morph us into Christlikeness. Paul, in Galatians 4:19, longs that “Christ be formed” in his Galatian brothers and sisters.

The issue here is not asking “what would Jesus do?” but rather doing what Jesus did, as a matter of the heart. For example, if I had the heart of a great soccer player I would do what a great soccer player does. Jesus, as he hung dying on a cross, did not have took look at a wristband and ask the question, “Now what would I do?” Rather, Jesus forgave his persecutors, and we must believe he did so not as a matter of ethical protocol but because this was, indeed, his very heart.

The word Romans 12:2 uses is, in Greek, metamorphe. Literally, this is about “a change of form.” What is needed here are not more ethical rules to follow, since one can obey laws without having a heart for them. This concerns what Dallas Willard has called “the renovation of the heart.” To be morphed into like-Christ-ness.

Because the magnitude of the transformation is so great, we realize we can’t do this by means of our own will power.

Therefore…

3. I CAN’T SELF-TRANSFORM

Spiritual formation and transformation into like-Christness is not something we can do on our own. Indeed, if it were something we could do on our own, then we will have greatly diminished Christ. When it comes to this kind of change it is good to realize that we can’t “self-transform.” This is one thing we cannot do in our own wisdom and strength.

There is some good news here. This realization, if it is a heart-reality, frees us from “striving.” When it comes to personal transformation no striving is allowed. It simply won’t do any good to “try harder.” The goal of heart-morphing into Christlikeness is so beyond us that striving is useless. If we are to be transformed, only God can do it.

4- ONLY GOD CAN EFFECT THE NEEDED TRANSFORMATION

The God who spoke and brought a universe into being is not puzzled by you and I. We pose no special obstacle to change, except that, in our created uniqueness, we could exercise free will to oppose being changed. 

God can change me into greater Christlikeness, and desires to do so.

Therefore…

5 – GET INTO GOD'S PRESENCE AND DWELL THERE/ABIDE IN CHRIST

Allow God to get his hands on you. Enter into the “spiritual gymnasium” and “exercise unto godliness.” (See 1 Timothy 4:7) But isn’t that a kind of “striving?” No, because the spiritual exercises or disciplines are simply ways of ushering us into God’s presence. Once we abide there, God himself changes us. We are like lumps of clay on a potter’s wheel, with God himself the shaper of our hearts.

John 14-16 is important here, as Jesus gives his “final discourse” to his disciples. Be a branch, connected to Jesus the true Vine. The stuff and life and resources and joy and peace and power of “the Vine” begins to course through the arteries of “the branch.” Just as a branch could not be attached to a healthy apply tree and fail to produce apples, so you and I cannot consistently dwell in God’s presence & remain unchanged.

Don't focus on change.

Don't work to make it happen.

Focus on staying connected to Christ, and you will be changed.

Mostly, this is a slow-cooker, not a microwave.

Free Speech Victory at the Supreme Court

 

                                                                 (Batesville, Arkansas)

In a landmark decision last month, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld free speech for all Americans in 303 Creative v. Elenis, stating, “as this Court has long held, the opportunity to think for ourselves and to express those thoughts freely is among our most cherished liberties and part of what keeps our Republic strong.” Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys represented Denver-area graphic artist and website designer Lorie Smith and her studio 303 Creative, whom Colorado had censored for seven years.

 

“The U.S. Supreme Court rightly reaffirmed that the government can’t force Americans to say things they don’t believe. The court reiterated that it’s unconstitutional for the state to eliminate from the public square ideas it dislikes, including the belief that marriage is the union of husband and wife,” said ADF CEO, President, and General Counsel Kristen Waggoner, who argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of Lorie and 303 Creative. “Disagreement isn’t discrimination, and the government can’t mislabel speech as discrimination to censor it.”

Full article HERE.

Being In the Will of God

 

Monroe County Community College

"Hearing God only makes sense in the framework of living in the will of God." (Willard, Hearing God, K125)

But of course. If someone is not living in the will of God, how should they expect to hear from God, except the Spirit telling them "Live in the will of God."

For Willard, "doing the will of God is a different matter than just doing what God wants us to do." (Ib.) It is about being in the will of God; or, being (living) in the heart of God. 

Living in the heart of God includes doing, but is in the first place about being. "Generally we are in God’s will whenever we are leading the kind of life he wants for us." (Kindle Location 135)

It is possible to do all the things that God wants us to do and still not be the kind of person God wants us to be. A religious person, for example, might do all kinds of things without having a heart of love. Willard writes: "An obsession merely with doing all God commands may be the very thing that rules out being the kind of person he wants us to be." (K136)

Love comes first, from which appropriate obedience emerges.

First, live life out of your "in Christ" status. This is the great Pauline imperative. Hearing God's voice is a byproduct of a Christ-abiding life.

How to Hear God's Voice

Here are some thoughts on How to Hear God's Voice.

1. Saturate yourself in Scripture.

2. Read the Bible realistically – assume that the experiences recorded there are basically of the same kind as ours would have been if we have been there.

3. Don’t fast-food the God-relationship.

4. Don't multi-task the God-relationship.

5. Have a humble heart. Humility is needed for all authentic listening.

6. Hang around people who actually do #s 1-5 above. Talk together about what you feel God has been saying to you.

BOOKS on the theme of listening to God - Here are some of my favorites.

Dallas Willard. Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God (IVP: 1999)

Blackaby, Henry T., and King, Claude V. Experiencing God. An excellent, clearly written text that is especially good for church study.

Deere, Jack. Surprised By the Voice of God: How God Speaks Today Through Prophecies, Dreams, and Visions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996). A very good, clearly written biblical and historical presentation of how one hears God speaking to them.

Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child. This book spoke deeply to me about my need for experiential knowledge of the love of God.

Brennan Manning, The Importance of Being Foolish: How to Think Like Jesus. Very good as it gets at the real Jesus.

Payne, Leanne. Listening Prayer: Learning to Hear God’s Voice and Keep a Prayer Journal (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1991). A very good, well-written text on what it means to hear God’s voice.

D.L. Moody had many years of successful ministry, when one day he had a powerful experience with God. Moody writes: "I cannot describe it, I seldom refer to it, it is almost too sacred an experience to name… I can only say God revealed Himself to me, and I had such an experience of His love that I had to ask Him to stay His hand. I went to preaching again. The sermons were not different; I did not present any new truths; and yet hundreds were converted. I would not now be placed back where I was before that blessed experience if you should give me all the world; it would be as small dust in the balance.” (Dallas Willard, Hearing God, 49)

'Arsenokoitais' Redux ('1946')

                                                                       (Rain drops)

The recent movie '1946' claims "that the biblical translators of the Revised Standard Version made an error when they chose to use the word “homosexual” in a couple of verses that appear in two of Paul’s New Testament letters. The contention is that those working on the text should have rendered the Greek term in the manuscripts to be something that represents an abusive form of sex vs. what eventually appeared in the English RSV translation." (See here.)

The Greek words are arsenokoitais and malakoi. See:

“Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9–10).

“But we know that the Law is good, if one uses it lawfully, realizing the fact that law is not made for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching, according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, with which I have been entrusted” (1 Tim. 1:8–11).

Arsen means 'male'; koite means 'bed'.

For the meaning of arsenokoitais see my post "Arsenokoitais" (ἀρσενοκοίταις) in 1 Timothy 1:10 (et. al.). 

Arguably the most thorough, scholarly treatmen of these two words is by New Testament scholar Robert Gagnon, in The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics. (Pp. 378 - 412)

What does Gagnon think of '1946'? He tweets: 

"The so-called "1946" film is one of the dumbest pieces of heretical propaganda that I have ever witnessed (and I have seen a lot). Churches that buy into that propaganda are both heretical and exegetically incompetent. *Arsenokoitai* in 1 Cor 6:9 means "men lying with a male.""

 

Same-Sex Marriage: What About Shellfish? Or Wearing Garments with Two Kinds of Fabrics?

(Ann Arbor)

(I am again posting this for someone who asked.)

This post is only for those who hold the Judeo-Christian Scriptures as authoritative. 

Someone recently presented this argument to me. I've heard it before. It's time to present the other, more biblically accurate, side. Because the argument relies on a misuse of the Bible, while appealing to its authority.

The argument goes like this.

"The prohibition against homosexual practice in ancient Israel was part of the ceremonial, Levitical law, which also prohibited things such as eating shellfish and pork or wearing a garment made of two kinds of fabrics. Obviously, those laws no longer apply to us today." (From Michael Brown, Can You Be Gay and Christian?: Responding With Love and Truth to Questions About Homosexuality, p. 106.)

Michael Brown's response is:

"There were some laws that God gave to Israel to keep them separated from the nations, such as the dietary laws, while other laws were based on universal moral prohibitions that applied to all people, such as laws against murder, adultery, and homosexual practice. These universal moral prohibitions obviously apply to all believers today, while the dietary laws do not." (Ib.)

Brown, who has a PhD in ancient Semitic languages from New York University, and who is arguably one of our greatest Messianic scholars, details this position in Chapter 5: "Levitical Laws and the Meaning of To'Evah (Abomination)."

When I first heard the "shellfish and mixed garments argument," I thought, "Something is wrong with this?" It struck me as hermeneutically naive. If you are going to use this argument in the same-sex discussion, please study it in more depth. Read Brown (and others, like *Robert Gagnon) on this. (It's interesting how these arguments float around in the minds of people who have never studied them, yet are used to support their position. I've done it. I give you permission to let this argument go.)

The prohibition against homosexuality was a universal prohibition. For example, the laws concerning murder are universal, for all people, and not just for Israel. Brown writes:

"How do we know this? It’s simple. The Bible tells us—just to give one example—that God judged Israel for eating unclean animals, but the Bible never tells us that God judged the nations of the world for eating unclean animals. Why? Because it was not intrinsically sinful to eat a pig rather than a cow (although in the ancient world, in particular, it might have been a lot more unhealthy to eat a pig), but it was intrinsically sinful to commit other sins, such as murdering another human being. 
That’s why laws against murder were established by God for all humanity after Noah’s flood, according to Genesis 9:6, whereas God permitted the human race to eat all animals for food (v. 3), as long as the blood was drained. In the same way, the Lord rebuked foreign nations for their sins against one another—acts of murder and violence—because these were wrong for all people, but, as stated, He did not rebuke them for eating animals that were considered unclean for the Israelites. This also carries over to the New Testament, where the authors reiterate God’s universal moral code—laws against murder and adultery, for example—while making clear that food in and of itself doesn’t defile us or make us holy. 

So, to repeat and summarize: there were laws God gave to Israel alone, and there were laws God gave to all people, including Israel, and for the most part, using the entire Bible as our guide, it is easy to see which are which." (Ib., 114)

What about wearing clothes with mixed fabrics? Brown writes:

"God never said that He judged the nations of the world for eating unclean animals or sowing their fields with two different kinds of seeds or wearing garments with mixed fabrics. Nor did He say that the land vomited them out for doing these things. But He did say that about the sins listed in Leviticus 18, including homosexual practice." (Pp. 115-116)

At this point I should just quote Brown's entire chapter. Don't make the shellfish/mixed garments argument any more without reading this.

***
* See Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics, especially Chapter 1, "The Witness of the Old Testament." New Testament scholar Jürgen Becker calls Gagnon's book "the most sophisticated and convincing examination of the biblical data for our time."

For example:

"Lev 18:22 occurs in a larger context of forbidden sexual relations that primarily outlaws incest (18:6-18) and also prohibits adultery (18:20), child sacrifice (18:21), and bestiality (18:23). These prohibitions continue to have universal validity in contemporary society. Only the prohibition against having sexual intercourse with a woman "in her menstrual uncleanness" (18:19) does not." 

GIVING TWO WORKSHOPS Saturday Morning in NYC

 

Linda and I will be at Faith Bible Church-Hope Center, Flushing, NYC, this Saturday morning, July 22.

I will give two workshops.

10:30 AM - "Technology and Spiritual Formation"

11:30 AM - "Responding to LGBTQ Issues"

Free admission.

Coffee and donuts served.

154-02 41st Avenue

Flushing, NY

July 24-27 - MARRIAGE, PARENTING AND SEXUALITY: A PASTORAL PERSPECTIVE

 

FAITH BIBLE SEMINARY

Flushing, New York City

July 24-27

9 AM - 3 PM EST

To register:

Sign up to observe the course: $190 Registration elective credits: $380

MARRIAGE, PARENTING AND SEX: A PASTORAL PERSPECTIVE

Christians in the Western world are under pressure to conform to the perspectives of a post-Christian worldview. In today's Western culture, liberal, progressive, postmodern, and secular views of "sex" are increasingly at odds with orthodox biblical theology. This course will focus on how to respond to issues related to "sex" in marriage, parenting, and the church. In the course we will:

• Present the orthodox, biblical position on issues of human sexuality 
• Explain the terms: 'liberal'; 'progressivist'; 'postmodern'; 'secular'
• Present liberal/progressive/secular perspectives on human sexuality 
• Equip students to understand and defend the orthodox position on human sexuality 
• Equip students and pastoral leaders how to navigate these issues, in love, and in truth 
• Equip parents on how to guide their children through the moral wilderness that is Western culture 
• Equip students with resources that lovingly and truthfully present a biblical view of human sexuality
• Share resources that can be used, in a church contret, for: Children's ministry, Youth ministry, Young Adult ministry, Adult ministry

Instructor: John Piippo, PhD 

Love Is Not the Greatest

 

                                                (Foggy Morning in Monroe County - 1/3/21)

(Some morning meditations on love...)

Is love great? Depending on your definition of love, yes.

Is love the greatest thing of all? No. Among the triad of faith, hope, and love, love wins. Love, biblical-style, is therefore greater than faith and hope. This does not say love is greater than all things. 1 Corinthians 13:13 reads - now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. Note the words "of these."

Love is not greater than Christ. One day, every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess, that Christ, not love, is lord of all.

Aren't Christ and love the same thing? No. Christ is a person. Love is a quality, an attribute, like "red," in "This apple is red."

In 1 Corinthians 13 love is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit's grace. But, of course, love is not the Holy Spirit.

God is love. But love is not God. There is an asymmetric relationship between God and love. 

Love is not a being. God is. God is Supreme Being. Love is one of God's essential attributes. Love is an inexorable manifestation of the being of God.

Love has no ontological status. Love is not some entity that exists apart from persons. The reality of love depends on persons. The love of God can manifest through persons who are connected to Jesus.

Love is an expression of the being of God. But, again, this does not mean that love is God. 

For followers of Jesus like myself, what does love look like? Love looks like Jesus. Therefore, I study Jesus. In studying Jesus, in coming to know Christ, I come to know love as He is love.

One result of studying and knowing Jesus is seeing that, throughout and to the cross, Jesus hates sin, and calls us to repentance. This, also, is love. Romans 2:4 says, Can’t you see that his kindness is intended to turn you from your sin? (NLT)

Out of the heart of Jesus come words like, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near! (John 4:16) Because it is not loving to coddle sin.  

This, in my mind, is where some Christian writers fail me. To me, they elevate love above Christ and, as a result, diminish both. One cannot simultaneously embrace Christ and sin and label it "love." To do this is to commit the sin of over-affirmation.

Yes, Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so.

Worship Christ, not love. And in this way, know what love is.

Progressivism Aligns with Postmodernism

 

                                                                (Holland, Michigan)

Whenever I have talked with a self-identified "progressive" Christian I have come away thinking they smell of postmodernism. Pluckrose and Lindsay affirm this. They write,

"The progressive left has aligned itself not with Modernity but with postmodernism, which rejects objective truth as a fantasy dreamed up by naive and/or arrogantly bigoted Enlightenment thinkers who underestimated the collateral consequences of Modernity’s progress. It is this problem that we have dedicated ourselves to learning about and hope to explain in this volume: the problem of postmodernism, not just as it initially arose in the 1960s but also how it has evolved over the last half century. Postmodernism has, depending upon your view, either become or given rise to one of the least tolerant and most authoritarian ideologies that the world has had to deal with since the widespread decline of communism and the collapses of white supremacy and colonialism."

Pluckrose, Helen; Lindsay, James A.. Cynical Theories (pp. 12-13). Pitchstone Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

Most progressive Christians don't realize their metaphysical dependence on postmodernism; indeed, they would not be able to tell you what postmodernism is.

"Marriage, Parenting, and Sexuality"

 

I'll be teaching "Marriage, Parenting, and Sexuality" at Faith Bible Seminary, in Flushing, NYC.

July 24-27, 9 AM - 3 PM

Linda will co-teach Day 3 with me.

Here's the link. (See icon for ENGLISH translation.)

David Gushee's "Embarrassingly Bad Exegesis"

 

                                (Monroe county)

A friend recommended David Gushee's Changing Our Minds to me. Gushee now supports same-sex marriage.

I haven't changed my mind, even after reading Gushee's book. Textually, marriage is between a man and a woman. 

New Testament scholar (which Gushee isn't; and, BTW, neither am I) Robert Gagnon was unimpressed. (Gagnon's massive The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics, is essential reading in this area.) In a review, Gagnon writes:

"Dr. Gushee carries no "intellectual heft" on the issue of Scripture and homosexuality, for two simple reasons: 

(1) Dr. Gushee is heavily dependent on the "wet-behind-the-ears" Matthew Vine for his "exegesis" of biblical texts pertaining to the issue of homosexuality; and 

(2) Dr. Gushee has ignored nearly all the major arguments against his embarrassingly bad exegesis, even when I sent him links to online articles that summarize more extensive arguments in my published work."

One of Gushee's most disappointing chapters is called "Two Odd Little Words," on the meaning of arsenokoites and malakoi. Gushee says, because we cannot know the meaning of these words, we cannot use them in an argument against same-sex marriage. I find his reasoning absurd.

So does Gagnon (and many New Testament scholars, which I have named elsewhere). Gagnon writes (I quote him at length):

"Dr. Gushee was trying to argue that these terms had to do only with exploitative forms of homosexual practice. It was clear that he had no personal facility with Greek and was significantly dependent on Matthew Vines (who likewise has no personal facility in Greek). The research, such as it was, was amateurish and unworthy of a scholar."

Gagnon continues,

"I sent him a private message on FB, asking him that if he was not willing to take an hour or two to read my 33-page analysis of these two terms in The Bible and Homosexual Practice (303-36), he might at least look at a 5 page online summary of the 4 arguments for malakoi and 8 for arsenokoitai, arguments which indicate that these terms are inclusive of adult-committed male homosexual relationships (point 4 here). I asked him if he would revise his article by at least responding to these arguments, heretofore ignored. He thanked me and did revise his article, but not in light of my arguments; rather, only in light of the comments that others, who were not scholars, left below his online article.

In his revision, he not only ignored my arguments, but he also mischaracterized an important scholar's view (William Loader) as supporting his (Gushee's) viewpoint and opposing mine (the exact opposite was the case). He added a reference from "biblical scholar Michael Vasey" about the cultural milieu. Yet Vasey, who was not a biblical scholar but a gay Anglican priest who died at age 52 (of HIV complications, according to some accounts), was oblivious to the evidence for committed homosexual relationships in the ancient world.

Dr. Gushee followed this with an over-reaching theological claim about Paul that is unsustainable from the evidence. He claimed that God's grace precludes the possibility that Paul could have warned sexual offenders, including homosexual offenders, about exclusion from God's kingdom. Yet Paul's offender list in 1 Cor 6:9-10 is precisely such a warning ("Stop deceiving yourselves: [The following] shall not inherit the kingdom of God"), where the larger context is the shocking case of a self-proclaimed Christian "brother" at Corinth in a sexual relationship with his stepmother (1 Cor 5). Paul has similar warnings to converts about sexual immorality sprinkled throughout most of his extant letters.

So I asked Dr. Gushee a second time through private FB messaging to respond to the many counterarguments that I offered. He sent me the message, "I appreciate your comments. Thank you.""

Gushee didn't respond. 

5 MINUTE DISCIPLESHIP - PRAYER

Praying for the American Church on Independence Day

(Josh & Nicole, Ludington, MI)

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard warned that "the day when Christianity and the world become friends, Christianity is done away with." Today, the Western world has unfriended Christianity. But probably not for the reasons Kierkegaard was thinking of; i.e., on fire for Jesus. The church in Denmark, in Kierkegaard's time, was mostly indistinguishable from the culture.

If SK was alive today would he would conclude that Christianity in the West is over and done with? If Jesus returned today, and came to America, would he find persistent faith?

The American Church has a lot of world-conformation, which the apostle Paul warned against. Churches must resist becoming people-pleasing, infrastructure-maintaining, non-offending, consumer-driven Entertainment Centers. (See Francis Chan - is Chan the new Kierkegaard?) We're living in the Age of Show Business. Some churches mimic this. See Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

On this Independence Day in America, I am praying for our churches to come alive, in a Book of Acts way. I am pleading with the Holy Spirit to ignite the followers of Jesus. To stun us. To confront us. To break us. To wake us.

My hope is that churches would forget trying to be cool and relevant. This is not working. Our imitative coolness only reinforces the Age of Show Business.

We must take hold of our Exodus 33 distinctive, which is the presence of God. (See my book Leading the Presence-Driven Church.) 

Today, on July 4, I am praying for Christians to establish Dependence on God Day. Let's see if God really will straighten our paths if we trust in him with all our hearts.

America's problems are not primarily political or economic, but spiritual and moral. Jesus knew the latter affects the former. Jesus was after the human heart. When the heart is transformed, behaviors follow. I have experienced this in my own life. I'm not at the level of Jesus yet, but I've seen countless people leave their egos behind and become other-centered. 

I am praying for a great move of God across our nation. Beginning in our nation's churches. Another Jesus Revolution. Another Welsh Revival. Another Great Awakening. 

Even... a Greater Awakening.

Something like what is now happening in the young adults and teens in my church.

Like the stories and testimonies from these young people we heard at our conference last week, and on Sunday morning. 

God Is Wrathful Because God Is Love

                                                                   (Monroe County)

Yale theologian Miroslav Volf personally witnessed the horrors of the Bosnian war. Out of this context he wrote,

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, mypeople shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days!

​How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.

 Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, (Zondervan 2005) pp. 138-139