Christian Women and Social Media: Living Your Faith Online
Elizabeth Hyndman:
Social media and the internet in general can have a pretty negative connotation these days. Broadcasting our lives online and having access to so much information often fuels issues with identity, bullying, stewardship, anxiety, anger, and more. However, social media and the internet can also be beautiful tools used to create community, resource leaders, and point women toward the Word of God.
Pastoring Is So Much More Than Preaching
Tim Challies:
Here is the question that has been challenging me: Can a shepherd care for his flock if he doesn’t know his flock? Can he be faithful to his charge if he doesn’t really know his sheep? Can he keep watch over all the flock if he is not familiar with the individual lives and challenges of the flock?
How Jesus’ Parables Expose Our Self-Centeredness
Michael Kelley:
But “lost” isn’t a bad word; it’s certainly a biblical word. In fact, it’s a word that cannot be separated from the identity of Jesus. The Son of God made it crystal clear that the His mission to earth is about the lost: “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). And before that, in Luke 15, Jesus told three stories about what lost things. These stories involve a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a pair of lost sons, and they are some of the best known stories of Jesus.
Biblical Theology in Discipleship
Nancy Guthrie:
A number of years ago, I was teaching a study of Genesis in my church when one of the discussion group leaders, an older godly woman, came and sat down by me. “How come I’ve never been taught this before?” she said with tears in her eyes. She was beginning to recognize that, as many years as she had spent studying the Bible, she had never seen how the story of the Bible fit together in a way that is centered on the person and work of Christ from Genesis to Revelation. She was seeing and adoring Christ in new ways. Her tears were for all of the lost years of approaching the Bible in lesser ways. And I totally related to that. As someone who grew up having all of the answers in Sunday School, studying Bible in college, and a career in Christian publishing, as well as years spent in Bible Study Fellowship as an adult, when I began to hear preaching and teaching that was saturated in biblical theology, I realized I needed to go back to kindergarten in terms of understanding the Bible. I wanted to understand it in the way Jesus taught it to his disciples when “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”
We Are Not Omni-Anything
Allyson Todd:
The first couple took the gift of perfect community with God and sold it for a curse. From that day until now, and for every day until Jesus returns, we roam the earth, searching for anyone and anything to fill the God-shaped hole in us.
We long for community, and we long to be like God. We want omni-autonomy and omni-presence in our relationships. Omni-autonomy is our desire to be individuals, not bound by another, and wholly separate from others. We want to be like God. Omni-presence is our desire to be everywhere, not bound by place or time, and wholly accessible to others. We want to be like God.Yet we are not omni-anything.