Quote of the Day

  "To sin is to love yourself at the expense of your neighbor.  More than that, it is to love yourself at the expense of God. Sin-shaped love expresses itself primarily in the form of narcissism.  It is self-absorbed love. This affection is hate masquerading as love, compelling us to engage in self-destructive behavior. Sin promises freedom and delivers slavery.  It speaks the language of friendship while treating us like enemies.  Sin is a cruel master who promises good wages only to reward our loyalty with hard service, disappointment and death.  For some reason, we return again and again to this false lover and expect a different result.

The answer to sinful lust is love - God's love, which comes to us from the outside, like the righteousness of Christ.  Adopting the language that Martin Luther used to speak of Christ's righteousness, we might call it 'alien love' because it does not originate with us. It is a love that begins with God and can come to us only as a gift. For the Christian, this greater love is the organizing force for all our other desires.  In this regard, love is not so much an emotion as it is a disposition. We might call it a divinely empowered direction for our lives.....What is true of lust is true of all capitol sins.  Change may require discipline, but it does not begin with discipline.  What is required is a miracle of grace." 

John Koessler

Dangerous Virtues: How to Follow Jesus When Evil Masquerades as Good

Quote of the Day

"…our society is strongly individualistic and 'me-centered.'  We have a tendency to 'look out for number one' and often have less regard for others.  Whereas in many of our organizations and structures individuality is encouraged, there is little place for it in the body of Christ.  Can you imagine an arm proclaiming its independence from the rest of the body?  Not only would the arm become gangrenous and rot away, but the body would be damaged by its absence.  While the world tends to teach us to be self-focused, as believers we must endeavor to be others-focused.  This is expressed in Jesus's command to deny ourselves....... Many believers today envision the Christian faith as more of a picnic or a walk in the park than a bloody sacrifice of the self, but the former is not the biblical portrait."

 Ten Things I Wish Jesus Never Said by Victor Kuligin

Quote of the Day

"…we have repurposed the Christian faith in a way that is generically individualistic.  We claim that we don't need the church to worship, that we can worship anywhere.  We claim that no one can judge us.  We claim that our relationship with God is our business alone.  We have even taken the process of spiritual development, and narrowed it down to an individualistic activity.  The height of Christian maturity, in many American churches, is a consistent quiet time…….

Among conservative evangelicals, there are many who are guilty of this radical individualism in ways that are not readily apparent.  Consider, how we regularly judge the success of a worship service.  We leave and say things like, 'That was great! I really got fed today!'  That sounds mature, and faithful.  It sounds like we are prioritizing good biblical teaching, but it is actually in opposition to biblical worship.  When we judge the effectiveness of a worship service by what it does for us, we have made ourselves the object of the worship experience.  Faithful worship is not measured by how much we are filled up, but rather how much we are emptied and worship is about sacrificing ourselves in our worship of the only God Who is worthy.""

From the book: Leveling the Church: multiplying your Ministry by Giving it Away - By Micah Fries and Jeremy Maxfield