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3 Great Miracles of the Christian Life: New Creatures in Christ
This is Part 1 of The Three Great Miracles of the Christian Life. Part 2 “Off to War: Spiritual Battle” is here. The Christian life is full of times and seasons that can feel very ordinary. We have a lot of time to practice the quality of perseverance, or as I prefer to call it, the utter slog. Don’t get me wrong. We absolutely grow in those times. But something else is true too, a big fat miracle: we are new creatures in Christ. Just because the Christian life sometimes feels ordinary does not make it so. Christianity is the glittering banquet hall, the castle, the royal procession, the treasure! Why…
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The Bathroom Prayer Circle
I teach the women’s Bible study group at my church and have for over 10 years. We have prayed for each other weekly during all that time and have seen miracles. But there is one recent miracle that I will never forget. Alice is one of our long-time members. A delightful, feisty, funny, fighting daughter of God. She’s in her 80s but always had great physical health and is still a caretaker for the sick. But then she got sick with severe altitude sickness — which is ironic since she’s lived in the mountains for years. One of her symptoms is severe nosebleeds. A couple of Tuesdays ago she came…
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Evangelical Churches are Growing Faster than Liberal Ones — Well, Duh
In the I-could-have-told-them-that department, a recent study on Canadian churches reported that evangelical churches were growing faster than their liberal counterparts, even in the same denomination. (BTW, please keep in mind that “evangelical” doesn’t mean a political conservative, although many are — it means a conservative approach to the literal truth of the Bible.) The Christianity Today article titled “Even in Canada, Conservative Churches Are Growing” discusses the research. It’s good, please read it. And here is my take: liberal churches are essentially telling their congregants to be nice and go out and help people. But you don’t need to attend church to do that, so why bother going on…