Church

Jesus can you take the time To throw a drowning man a line Peace on Earth To tell the ones who hear no sound Whose sons are living in the ground Peace on Earth Jesus sing a song you wrote The words are sticking in my throat Peace on Earth Hear it every Christmas time But hope and history won't rhyme So what's it worth This peace on Earth -- Bono, "Peace on Earth" Hope and history. Hope is what we aspire to, what we know is possible.  Hope believes and trusts and holds on to the promises of God.  Hope inspires. History is what actually happens.  History tells the story of our ups and downs, our wins and our losses.  History is littered with beauty and marred by ugliness. There are times when hope and history tell the same story.  Or, as Bono would say, they rhyme.  We see…

The Lord's Prayer contains a curious word that has survived in most English translations from the King James (1611) to the New International Version (1980's).  The word?  Hallowed. Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name" (Matthew 6:9).  But what does it mean? The basic meaning is this: "to make holy or sacred, to sanctify or consecrate, to venerate" (Source: Dictionary.com).  Wikipedia also has a great article on the word itself and its usage. But why does it matter?  It matters for this reason: What I believe about God will shape the way I live my life. If I believe God is a ... Slumbering Grandfather (I'll see what I can get away with) Harsh Judge  (I’ll live in fear of him) Warm Fuzzy (Sin may not bother that much because he will love me anyway) To help illustrate this, we used a video…

This weekend at Mountainview I taught on the first part of the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father ..."  To help us understand the nature of our new relationship with God as Father, I turned to Ephesians 1:4-6: "Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes.  God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son (NLT)" We often describe our salvation experience as being "born again" and rightly so (cf., John 3:3, 1 Peter 1:23).  Through faith in Jesus, we receive a new life -- a second chance.  We speak of the old life…

This falls under the category of "Why didn't I know this before now?" I just learned tonight that you can enable a feature in Microsoft Word that scores your document in terms of readability.  I pasted in a blog entry and was amazed at how it breaks things down.  To learn more, visit this page at Microsoft. Hat tip to Angel Tuccy for passing this along.

In 1999, I co-founded a company with a few other guys with the intention of helping non-profits raise money online. Having lived in the non-profit world for all of my adult life (serving as a pastor), I was intimately aware of how non-profits had great missions and little money. I was a bit of a romantic: the goal was to set aside 10% of our revenue to go towards church planting.  Unfortunately, we made no money. Shortly after shutting that down, I went to work for the first iteration of Christianity.com (now on its third or fourth owners).  At the beginning we had all the Starbucks coffee and Krispy Kreme donuts we could handle.  At the end, it was "bring your own coffee and napkins."  After a fun ride, I was eventually laid off. After that I went into a period of doing contract work for a law firm handling…