Journey to The Journey

The term "Christian" is often misused and misappropriated today. For many people who don't completely deny the existence of God, like atheists, but also don't actively participate in any type of formal religion, Christianity seems like a suitable demographic with which to "self-identify."

People often ask me to recommend churches to their friends and family who live in or around this area. After all, I love my church but I'm not delusional in thinking The Journey works for everyone. When people attend your church and aren't "feeling it" you don't have to get offended. Instead, develop a kingdom mindset and recommend other faithful churches so more people can get plugged in and more churches can grow.

Besides simply looking at the content of Peter's message (which is highly profitable itself), let us step back and look at a few important lessons we can learn from the methods Peter uses to preach and teach the Gospel message. By doing so, hopefully we can draw out some guidelines to help us recognize what good teaching looks like, so that we can seek it out and gain from it.

Miracles, like speaking in tongues, always have a purpose. To put it most succinctly, a miracle (in theological terms) is an event that defies the natural and scientific laws of the universe. In other words, a miracle, by definition, can only be attributed to some supernatural power.

This week at the Journey, we continued our study over the book of Acts with some frank teaching over the gift of tongues as we see it described in this passage from Acts chapter 2. Some of you may not be familiar with the charismatic segment of Christianity that celebrates and practices this and other spiritual gifts.

The issue at hand is a fundamental difference between the divinely-inspired, authoritative, and infallible word of God; and anything else that man thinks, feels, or says about God. The Bible is God's word. It is revelation from God for his people and it contains everything that we need to know about God, his design for how we are to live, and his plan of salvation. In other words, orthodox Christians must affirm the authority, necessity, and sufficiency of scripture. Additionally, we need to have a clear understanding of how the Bible has been received and understood throughout history.

As we learned this week, Jesus' gave these instructions to his followers shortly before his ascension into Heaven and they include four imperatives: go, make, baptize, and teach. So, what practical implications do these imperatives have for us as we seek to live in obedience to Christ? Let's look at them each, one at a time.

How could any christian not be fascinated with the book of Acts? This book of the bible tells us how church began. In our study we'll get to see the amazing works of the Holy Spirit in and through the hearts of God's people. The message in this book is beautiful, inspiring, messy, and at times even startling - afterall it is about the church. I expect that as our understanding of the initial explosion of the gospel message grows as will our commitment to spreading the gospel through the church today!

Don't let this book's position in the Bible fool you, there's more to Amos than you may realize. Amos is located in a section of your Bible known as the "writing prophets" or to label it as Jesus did "the prophets" (Matthew 5:17, Luke 24:27). Now typically when we think of Old Testament prophetic books the big-dogs come to mind like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel (the major prophets). Beyond those major prophets are twelve smaller prophetic books (Hosea - Malachi) known as the minor prophets, they're labeled "minor" ONLY because of the length of their books in comparison to the larger major prophets. In fact, the Hebrew Bible lumps all of these minor prophets into one book called "Book of the Twelve."

This week in our study over Paul's letter to the church at Philippi we got to take a look at the Apostle's extensive religious credentials: "circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless." His point was simple, if our standing before God is based on our merits, then he had plenty of reasons to feel pretty confident. However, the message here, and throughout the entirety of scripture is clear...our greatest human accolades and religious accomplishments are rendered worthless before a perfect and holy God.