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Most pastors are more than happy for someone else to choose the songs on Sunday morning. With sermon preparation, counseling, and countless other responsibilities, shouldn’t someone else worry about what the congregation will sing? While I understand the difficult demands of being a pastor, I want to encourage pastors to be involved in the selection of songs for corporate worship. Levels of engagement may differ (based on a number of factors), but it’s not appropriate for pastors to disengage completely. After all, there’s truth to the saying, “We are what we sing.” The songs we sing together shape our thoughts of God, the gospel, and the way we see the world. In fact, singing to one another is a mark of the Spirit’s filling (Ephesians 5:18–19) and the word of Christ dwelling in us richly (Colossians 3:16). With this in mind, I want to share six imperatives I’ve come to value in the selection of songs for corporate worship. Then I’ll describe how we put these principles into practice for a Sunday service at my church. Six Imperatives for Selecting Songs...

want to encourage you to read at least part of a denominational ad interim committee report on human sexuality. That may sound rather drab and difficult, but I am convinced you will find it both helpful and rewarding. It won’t even be particularly difficult. So let me set the context and then tell you why you should read it.

A while back, my good friend Tony Vance sent me an article and asked for my feedback. After reading only the title, “Why Are You Still A Christian, After Reading This? (Thorough)”, I answered: because Jesus. With a little prodding, (and some late night facepalming), I worked through Ben Alonzo’s piece, and jotted down some responses to his work. Shake Your Faith: The Truth In this section, Ben points out he was a hardcore Christian “until I started questioning what was actually in the Bible.” My first response to Mr. Alonzo, “Just how ‘hardcore’ were you if Bible study wasn’t even a part of your Christianity?” Choosing Jesus was a hard decision for me. In fact, just yesterday I shared with some close friends that I believe being a faithful Christian is the hardest job in the world. Bill Hybels in his book, “Courageous Leadership”, recounts a speech he gave to a group of Harvard business students. One student asked how church leadership had anything to do with secular success. “You are the best and brightest this world has to offer. You are going to do great things and make the best widgets and gizmos ever known. But the church is charged with changing the world.”...

It is an audacious claim of the Christian faith that there is only one way to heaven. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” we believe. Not most, not some, but all. Since all of us have sinned, all of us are lost and in need of saving. And this saving we so badly need can come from only one Savior since “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” Thus, we believe, there is only one way to be saved, only one way to heaven—Jesus Christ who is “the way, the truth, and the life.” No one comes to relationship with God, no one comes into the presence of God, no one gets to heaven, except through faith in Jesus Christ.

Time Well Spent? If someone observed an average day in your life, how would they see you spend your time? How much of your time is given to TV, Facebook, YouTube, podcasts, hobbies, and housework? How much time do you devote to Bible reading?

Sometimes we get confused about the way salvation works. Almost by accident, we can fall into a gospel that’s heavy on encouraging one another in God’s forgiveness and grace and mercy, but woefully light on warning one another of the dangers of diving headlong into sin. This kind of gospel has no word for the brother or sister who gives in to temptation over and over again — who “makes a practice of sinning" (1 John 3:8). “Sin is hell-bent on premeditated murder. It will kill you.” Over time, we avoid the Old Testament with all of its narratives of God's judgment, cherry-pick through the sermons of Jesus and the letters of Paul, then skip passed the harsh warnings of Hebrews and James. We select only the passages that tell us of God's love and forgiveness and joy. But are these warnings in Scripture not a part of God’s plan to save, too? Let’s admit the hard truth: Many of us are failing in the fight against daily temptation.

Bible study is not the same thing as Bible reading. If Bible reading is like raking for leaves, Bible study is like digging for diamonds. The Christian life calls for both. When we study the Bible, we are on a quest for meaning — and not just any meaning, but God’s meaning through the Bible’s human authors. Discovering God’s meaning may require hard work (digging for diamonds always does), but the journey will leave us with deeper knowledge, more Christlikeness, and a stronger sense of God’s beauty in his book...

Every religion, every worldview is telling a story. They're trying to take the things we know about the world and fit them together into a big picture. Do you want to learn more about the true Story of Reality? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxU0UNlnnOA

One of the great rediscoveries of the Reformation — especially of Martin Luther — was that the word of God comes to us in the form of a book, the Bible. Luther grasped this powerful fact: God preserves the experience of salvation and holiness from generation to generation by means of a book of revelation, not a bishop in Rome. The life-giving and life-threatening risk of the Reformation was the rejection of the pope and councils as the infallible, final authority of the church. Luther’s adversary, Sylvester Prierias, wrote, “He who does not accept the doctrine of the Church of Rome and pontiff of Rome as an infallible rule of faith, from which the Holy Scriptures, too, draw their strength and authority, is a heretic”...

I’m convinced we’re prone to make entirely too much of the most public gifts and entirely too little of the most private. We laud those who stand at the event podiums to preach the Word. We celebrate those who sit on the conference panels to answer our questions. We honor those who pen the few bestselling books. When given the opportunity, we surge forward to shake their hands, to snap a selfie, to share encouraging words.