RoboPreacher

when you give me the whole damn zoo A Pentecost sermon on the fruit of the Spirit : Remember that week before Lent began when I went to Des Moines to talk with other pastors about leadership? Well, one of my extracurriculars was to join Dr. Jones in his “Life and Thought of Martin Luther” class.  That’s where it all began for me … Well, they were working through “Freedom of a Christian.”  Dr. Jones asked about the famous claim; ‘although a Christian may be perfectly free and subject to none , a Christian is also a perfectly dutiful servant, subject to all .’ He asked the students how could that be. One earnest, young man offered the theory that, when you do something good for someone else you feel good about it.  Conventional wisdom at its finest, but not what Luther was after.  As I’ve thought about that, I’ve come to realize the profound challenge Luther and his ilk put to us.  Paul once put it like this, “I could not speak ...

but i wasn't sure just what Too many churches out there treat Jesus as the answer to any question or problem you’ve ever had and many others act like following Jesus is the most reasonable thing you could ever do. The problem with that, though, is everyone knows better. We should stop doing that. We should quit pretending the folks who don’t believe are crazy. The truth is, those folks who don’t believe might just have a little more sense than you who are here today. Following Jesus is hard.  In the early church, when outsiders would do all the work of coming to the church and asking to join; do you want to know what the church, in all it’s wisdom, would do? The church would say, ‘that’s great. You can join us, anyone can. It’s going to take a year, though. The year is going to be hard, and you’re going to have to give up everything. In fact, we meet early Sunday,’ -which at that time, was a work day. That’s how the early church did evangelism. Contrary to all th...