The countdown started on January 7th and now we only have three weeks left. College football begins soon and you can feel the excitement in the air in the South. Momentum begins to pick up with SEC media in July and now that camps have started, there are daily updates about how quarterbacks look and what players might be moving up the depth chart. I’ve loved college football my entire life. Some of my favorite memories involve Saturday trips to... Read more
When you think about places that need new churches, heavily Republican leaning counties in Alabama probably aren’t at the top of your list. Shelby County, located to the south of Birmingham, has been growing rapidly since 1990. During that time, the county has become the most unchurched in the state of Alabama, with only one in six people attending a worship gathering each Sunday. While some areas would consider this a revival, in the Bible Belt this represents the church... Read more
Interpersonal conflict is part of life. It would be nice if everyone got along all the time, but we don’t live in a world where this happens. Relational drama seems to follow us wherever we go, invading even the things that should be a distraction for us. Think about your social media timelines. How many of the posts have something to do with people and their relational difficulties and inability to get along? At least once a day I see... Read more
There have been many times in my Christian life when I struggled with my prayer life. Sometimes this happened because my prayer life began to feel stale, but the other times this happened because of a very different problem. Instead of working at my prayer life, I was drifting through my prayer life. D.A. Carson addresses this issue in our prayer lives in his book A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers. In doing so, he... Read more
How much damage do we do to other people with our words? We leave a scorched earth with our careless words as they cause mountains of hurt. Unfortunately we think we can excuse ourselves because “we didn’t mean for it to come across that way.” That’s the problem though isn’t it? The hurtful, careless words that come out of our mouths say more about who we are than the words we speak with intentionality. This is why Jesus says “I... Read more
Last night messengers at the Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting in Baltimore gathered to pray for revival. They prayed God would move in our churches and in our nation so that we might see Christians filled with God’s power and more people come to Christ. Influential Atlanta pastor Andy Stanley tweeted a string of observations that caused a stir. He argued that we shouldn’t pray for revival, instead working harder to do what we already know to do and praying... Read more
There was a time in my life when I hated to read. My best guess is that I finished five of the many books I was assigned in school. Things turned a corner for me when I became a Christian and started reading the Bible. People started recommending books for me to read and I found these books were challenging the way I read the Bible. Now as a Pastor, I find that reading non-fiction books keeps me sharp intellectually... Read more
“My wife is not the same person I married“ Matt Walsh writes about being committed to marriage for the long haul in a culture where divorce is not treated as an evil anymore. “This is what we do in our culture. Not just with divorce, but with so many other brands of bad decisions. We first justify them, then we advertise and sell them, then we celebrate them, then we insist that everyone else celebrate along with us. In the... Read more
When difficult times hit, my first instinct is not to think about the goodness of God and to rest in Him. Unfortunately, panic mode often sets in before I think through the truths that will give peace to my soul. The struggle for me in this throughout the years has been to remember the wise words of Martyn Lloyd-Jones in his book Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures. “Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due... Read more
No one would have to think long about examples of our culture’s love of being offended. While we usually think about how this plays itself out in cultural discussions, the truth is that we carry our propensity for getting offended into our personal relationships. Ask us what other people have done to us, and we can offer a laundry list of offenses. They might be harsh words or some kind of betrayal, but we cannot forget them and we cannot... Read more
One Degree to Another
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