My son is sick, so my wife stayed home tonight while I went to praise team practice at the church. While I was gone she watched Wife Swap. Tonight’s episode swapped a very conservative Christian family with a very liberal Christian family. In my trade mark fashion I will refer to them as “Connie” and “Libby”…you figure out which is which.

Connie is a stay-at-home mom, six kids (if I counted right). Libby works and her husband is a stay-at-home dad, 2 girls. I’m going to watch the episode as soon as I can find it somewhere online, but this is one situation related to me by my wife:

Connie’s children don’t date. Her philosophy is that young teens aren’t ready to make a serious (read: “lifelong”) commitment, so there’s no reason to date. Libby has no such rule.

When Connie sits down with Libby’s girls to discuss dating, she says, “This is what I believe about dating…What do you think?” When given the opportunity to think about it, one of the girls says that it makes a lot of sense. Over at Connie’s house, Libby has told her oldest girls that they have to go speed dating. They refused. (continue reading…)

This Sunday at Garnett Wade talked about demons. We’re going through this series called Chreaster, which is following Jesus life and work from Christmas through Easter. This week he talked about Jesus’ interactions with demons. He focused on three stories: the man in the synagogue in Mark 1, “Legion” in Mark 5, and the boy in Mark 9.

It was an interesting sermon that we discussed Sunday night when I sat in on the high school small group. We talked a lot about spirits and demons and whether or not we were talking about literal demons that can possess and control a person, or a person’s bad traits. Everyone seemed to come to the same conclusion that they’re are different issues and both equally valid.

Late in the discussion one of the girls was talking about how modern medicine has affected the perception of demons and miracles, using epilepsy as an example. It made me think of diseases like autism or ALS that aren’t really understood, they’re only classifiable. What if those types of diseases are in fact symptoms of possession?

As I type this I can see some people becoming upset or offended because they know or have known someone affected by one of the aforementioned disorders. Please don’t. I’m simply raising the question.

I don’t often read something I so whole-heartedly agree with, so here it is, in its entirety:

Mark Driscoll discussing Jesus and the woman at the well in John 4:

“And in his greatest act of love for this woman, Jesus later hung on a Roman cross- punished between two thieves- dying for the many sins of this woman. Jesus then rose from death and ascended into heaven to prepare an eternal home for her. He then sent the Holy Spirit to empower her new life and ministry.

Reformission is ultimately about being like Jesus, through his empowering grace. One of the underlying keys to reformission is knowing that neither the freedom of Christ nor our freedom in Christ is intended to permit us to dance as close to sin as possible without crossing the line. But both are intended to permit us to dance as close to sinners as possible by crossing the lines that unnecessarily separate the people God has found from those he is still seeking. To be a Christian, literally, is to be a ‘little Christ.’ It is imperative that Christians be like Jesus, by living freely within the culture as missionaries who are as faithful to the Father and his gospel as Jesus was in his own time and place.

I am advocating not sin but freedom. That freedom is denied by many traditions and theological systems because they fear that some people will us their freedom to sin against Christ. But rules, regulations, and the pursuit of outward morality are ultimately incapable of preventing sin. They can only, at best, rearrange the flesh and get people to stop drinking, smoking, and having sex, only to start being proud of their morality. Jesus’ love for us and our love for him are, frankly, the only tethers that will keep us from abusing our freedom, yet they will enable us to venture as far into the culture and into relationships with lost people as Jesus did, because we go with him.

So reformission requires that God’s people understand their mission with razor-sharp clarity. The mission is to be close to Jesus. This transforms our hearts to love what he loves, hate what he hates, and to pursue relationships with lost people in hopes of connecting with them and, subsequently connecting them with him. This actually protects us from sin, because the way to avoid sin is not to avoid sinners but to stick close to Jesus.”

The Radical Reformission, 39-40.

(H/T: Enjoying God Fellowship)

It was good.  Incredibly creative, impeccably done, very entertaining.  Unfortunately it was hard to enjoy due to the unbearable nausea brought on by the handycam perspective.  By the time we get through the first action sequence my stomach was starting to protest, and by the end of act two my wife and I both had to walk around outside the theater to keep our food down.  I stayed in the hall by the stairs so I could hear what was going on.

I liked it, but I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again.  I left the theater 3 1/2 hours ago and I still have a headache.

In direct contrast to the problem that prompted the adoption of rule #7, many people forget that Christianity comes with standards. I remember, after I wrote up what I thought was a particularly mild code of conduct for a youth group - something along the lines of “act like a Christian when you’re at church, and don’t wander the halls by yourselves” - a parent responded by saying, “We don’t ask adults to live up to that, why should we ask children?” I was so confused that I couldn’t respond.

It was all clothed in language about how we’re on a journey, and none of us is perfect, etc. But that is an exact quote. I was floored. What has Christianity come to when you can’t acknowledge a standard for behavior? when you can’t even ask teens to meet that standard for one hour a couple of days a week? What’s happened?

We’ve forgotten that we are saints. We’ve fallen into this “everyone’s special” trap, which leads to everyone being mediocre. The motto for the movement: “We’re all God’s children.” (continue reading…)

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