“Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed.” –James 5:16 Confession among evangelicals is a biblical practice rarely emphasized and hardly understood. For most, including myself growing up, it was a “Catholic” practice involving a priest as mediator between man and God who granted absolution [...]

SERMON: Grace and Peace to You – Galatians 1:1-10

I preached this sermon at Ryker’s Ridge Baptist Church on the morning of November, 13 2011. In this message, I speak of Paul’s gracious calling as an apostle, his gracious welcome to the churches at Galatia, and his gracious warning to those who are believing and teaching a false gospel. Grace is something that characterizes Paul’s ministry, and it should ours as well.

I sincerely hope you benefit from this message!

For the last month you could say I’ve had Dietrich Bonhoeffer “on my mind”. In reading his community-focused devotional, Life Together, I found several interesting insights and perspectives. Among them, Bonhoeffer discusses a dimension of life we all engage in: work. What I found to be novel was his insistence that work is essentially spiritual [...]

It’s always insightful to look at church through history. The challenges and themes of the past are not that different from those of our own. How to use money in the church is often a vexing and contentious issue. The wealth of congregations being devoted to primarily “in-house” areas is often taken for granted as [...]

Does this video remind you of your church or small group? I hope not. Unfortunately, though, I think the attitudes described here are all too common in our churches.

“What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything else of that sort. Christians come together because they have all been loved by Jesus himself. They are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus’ sake.”[1] [1] D. [...]

“The believer feels no shame, as though he were still living too much in the flesh, when he yearns for the physical presence of other Christians. Man was created a body, the Son of God appeared on earth in the body, he was raised in the body, in the sacrament the believer receives the Lord [...]

It is absolutely imperative that professing Christians join and be involved in a local church.  I have heard young people say way to often that they love Jesus and call themselves Christians but they see no reason to be involved in a local church.  I believe that this stems from many different sources.  Maybe they [...]