Glory of Christ Fellowship

Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person. - Colossians 4:6 They say that one way to lower blood pressure is to lower your intake of salt. I have done some research on this and to make a long story short, I'm not sure if this is more of an urban legend or a scientific reality. But to the extent that it is true, believers should have high blood pressure because Paul commands the church to let their speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt.  Salt has many functions. It flavors food. It preserves food. It also rusts cars. Assuming camels or donkeys didn't deal with rust issues we can be confident Paul wasn't thinking about our Toyotas or Fords. When Paul talks about salt in this passage it probably has to do with flavoring. Just like salt makes food taste good so speech should taste good to other believers.  Still, this isn't the insight I came to in this passage. The insight came from asking the q...

When we suffer, and especially when we intensely suffer, singing praise to God and giving thanks to God are among the last things we want to do and among the first things we need to do. On the one hand, giving praise and thanks to God magnifies his great name, and on the other hand, it helps us fix our eyes on him rather than on our circumstances and see things from his perspective rather than ours. Since King David suffered so much in his life and also wrote about it, he provides us with a great model of what it looks like to endure the trials of life with the praise of God on our lips. For example, in Psalm 69, David pours out his lament before God, describes the nature of his suffering (69:1-4, 7-12, 19-21), confesses his own sin, and prays that God would keep others from suffering for it (69:5-6). Having put these things on the table, he then prays for deliverance from and justice against his enemies (69:13-18, 22-29), and he pledges to give himself to the praise and thanks of God....

“We may be assured of this—the secret of all failure is our failure in secret prayer” (12). So writes the anonymous author of the classic little book on prayer entitled, The Kneeling Christian (Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids: 1971). He means that the reason we so often fall into sin or live in discouragement or fail to bear fruit is because we do not cling to God in Christ above all things. We do not diligently seek him or lean on him or plead with him or draw on his strength. We give ourselves to busyness over communion with God and in this way we seek to accomplish in our flesh what can only be accomplished in the power of the Spirit.  Giving first place to what our dear author calls “secret prayer” is indeed a key to the Spirit-filled life but let’s be clear: prayer is not magic, rather, it’s a relationship. It’s not as if we simply have to file requests with God, being careful to use just the right words so that we can get him to respond as we wish. God is not a vendi...

Psalm 50 begins with a declaration that stands at the center of life: God exists and he is the mighty one. As a demonstration of his being and power, he “speaks and summons the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting” (50:1). We may awake in the morning and set our eyes on the earth and feel appreciative for what we see and verbally express the affections of our hearts, but we have no place or power to summon the earth with authority from dawn to dusk because we are but creatures and not the Creator.  God, on the other hand, has all authority over all things, and therefore, as he summons the earth, he manifests his glory, he visits his people and speaks to them with great power, and he commands the heavens and the earth to witness his judgment of his people (50:2-5). In this case, his word to them was a word of rebuke because they had allowed themselves to drift away from him. For those who humbly received this word of rebuke, their instinct would likely have been to offer ...

Even after thirty-four years of following Jesus Christ, I am still amazed by his sovereignty. When he determines to issue a message to his Bride, he sees to it that the message is articulated by the right man at the right time, and that the message reaches all for whom it was intended. Nothing stops him from accomplishing his purposes! The Kneeling Christian (Zondervan, Grand Rapids: 1971) was written by an anonymous author “by request, and with much hesitancy” (7), and it was first published in England. Some years later, not long after brothers P. J. and Bernard Zondervan founded the Zondervan Publishing Company, P. J. stumbled across the work as he made a sales call in Seattle, Washington. The bookseller there had been blessed by the book and therefore commended it to Mr. Zondervan who in turn secured the rights to distribute it in the United States.  However, due to the devastating effects of World War II upon England, the publisher was no longer able to print the book and thus ...

Marriage gets a lot of attention in the church but relationships don't. It is easy to forget, after all, that when you boil it all down marriage is merely a relationship. Perhaps you would agree with me that a lot of the church's collective thought is given to marriage and less so to normal, everyday relationships. Perhaps this is because, culturally speaking, we are more turned on by romance and less so by friendships. Just make a list of movies featuring friendships vs romance and you will quickly see which heading had the more titles under it.  Paul uses the imagery of a body in 1 Corinthians 12-13 when he describes the church. Even though Scripture doesn't come in and announce that God will now be speaking on relationships a lot is being said on human interaction. When we think about how humans should interact with each other we need to give thought to what God thinks and how God has designed. When we learn that God thinks of his people as a body we start to realize t...

Jonathan Edwards served for twenty-one years (1729-1750) as the preaching Pastor of the Church of Christ in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a position held for about fifty years by his father-in-law and immediate predecessor, Solomon Stoddard. After decades of fruitful ministry, the congregation, along with area leaders, fired Edwards over issues related to the theology and practice of communion. History has shown that Edwards was right on the issues and that the congregation was wrong to fire him, but at the time, this decision plunged his family into a season of suffering. I cannot explain here the details of their predicament or suffering, but I would like to highlight several ways in which God used these things in Edwards’ life. First, God used this time to humble Edwards. As modern people, it’s hard for us to imagine this, but Edwards could not just pick up his family and move from Northampton. Travel was difficult, and moving an entire house-full of possessions was very difficult, an...

Hudson Taylor is one of the most important non-biblical heroes in my life. Thus, it was with joy and trembling that I read his call to cross-bearing, a call made credible by his cross-bearing life. I invite you to ponder his words with me, and more importantly, our way of life before the Lord.  “Hudson Taylor stopped at no sacrifice in following Christ. ‘Cross-loving men are needed,’ he wrote in the midst of his labors in China, and if he could speak to us today would it not be to call us to that highest of all ambitions: ‘that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings’ (Phil. 3:10). Can we not hear again the tones of his quiet voice as he says: ‘There is a needs-be for us to give ourselves for the life of the world. An easy, non-self-denying life will never be one of power. Fruit-bearing involves cross-bearing. There are not two Christs—an easy-going one for easy-going Christians, and a suffering, toiling one for exceptional believers. ...

While we were away, the Lor d graciously ministered to Kim and me even in the midst of some pretty inte nse circumsta nc es. As I began the process of reentering ministry, I felt compelled to share some things that the Lord has shared with me over the next several weeks, so instead of picking up where we left off in Revelation, we’re going to spend some time talking about “Suffering by Faith.” Below you will find the outline of the series, and I want to encourage you to make note of this, to read each text the week before the message, and to ask the Lord to teach you about each subject. I trust that as you seek him, he’ll speak to your heart through His Word and by His Spirit well before you hear what I have to say.  While it’s not always easy to see this in the midst of difficulties, seasons of suffering present us with great opportunities. For example, we can grow in faith. We can identify and repent of sinful patterns in our lives. We can praise and pray and call on the name of ...