JOEL 2 GENERATION

I've entitled this blog post after the name of a fairly well-known Christian book written by Wayne Jacobsen and Dave Coleman that came out back in 2008.  I listened to Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings for several years when they were doing "The God Journey" podcast together.  At the time I was listening to the podcast, I heard a lot of reasons that people were leaving churches. I heard about different levels of abuse and control and manipulation. A lot more of these dynamics are coming to light and clearly the Lord is doing something across the Body of Christ to expose and reveal a lot of unhealthy dynamics in churches and ministries. For reasons I've detailed elsewhere, the Lord led my wife and I clearly in the direction of house (or house-sized) churches which we had been leading for many years, and are now almost exclusively focusing on energy on. "Houses of Fire - A Strategy to Bring in the Harvest" -  LINK "Houses of Fire (a.k.a. House Churches) i

I had a convicting thought (thoughts) as I was re-reading Philippians over the past few days. After my message last week on "Death to Self and Living a Life of Humility"  LINK , I had to go back and edit the message (deleting stuff) and adding an Addendum at the end (about 12 minutes) explaining how I let the "sin in others become the sin in me" (to use use a well-known expression from Dan Mohler). While comparing and contrasting the lives of Kanye West and the Catholic nun Cabrini in an appropriate way I believe, I kept going and started naming some other names and being hyper-critical of other ministers and ministries. And it wasn't/isn't that the points I was making about these other ministries wasn't/isn't true. It was that I was NOT speaking about their errors/excesses in the right way. While criticizing their self-exaltation, I was doing so with an elite spirit (PRIDE), all during a sermon on the topic of dying to self and humility. Ugly stuff.

  I wonder if Kanye got the correct "Sign-Up Sheet" when he professed his Christian faith back in 2019. He surely doesn't understand Christianity in 2024. The Catholic nun Cabrini (1850-1917) did get the Biblical "Sign-Up Sheet" and lived a life of radical surrender. The recent movie about her life is a MUST SEE and will inspire any who watch it! No two Christians could be more different than Kanye and Cabrini. Many Christians today are not getting the original "Memo" that Jesus and His Apostle gave to people in the 1st century.  In this podcast, I talk about these foundational Christian teachings/foundations. The Christian life begins with us dying to ourselves and proceeds with a focus on humility before God and towards one another.  LISTEN HERE https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/joel2generation/episodes/2024-04-07T10_40_24-07_00  #deathtoself #selfdeath #humility #kanye #cabrini #kanyewest #francescabrini

JOHN 20:1 - Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance . 

As I am now in the middle of DAY 40, I wanted to write something INSPIRATIONAL as we go forward. Let's purpose to RESET things in our lives. Let's set some new goals. Nothing you want to do or to become will be any easier than if you start NOW! Dream big. Go after something NEW. Something you haven't done before. Something BEYOND what you think you can do.  I think of my daughter and son-in-law are doing in June - they are RUNNING a full marathon (26.2 miles) - something neither of them have ever done. I ran my first marathon at 49 years old. We are all living way below our God-given potential.  So, let my blog post today INSPIRE. I am inspired to go forward spiritually and physically with an expectation for growth and transformation. For such a time as this... LINK https://keto4christians.wordpress.com/2024/03/30/holy-week-lent-2024-day-40-holy-saturday-my-final-fasting-day/

The earliest Christians wrote a LOT about the atoning sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. They emphasized an aspect of the atonement that many conservative Protestant Evangelicals often overlook, which is largely due to the effect of the work of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury named Anselm (1033-1109). If there was one word, one concept that captured the theological minds of the earliest Christian theologians and apologists it was the word, RANSOM. I don't entirely know how to disentangle the "pollution" that Anselm mixed into Western Christian thinking about the atonement. The Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Christians, as well as the Church of the East do NOT incorporate the concepts that Anselm INTRODUCED into Western Christianity - both Roman Catholic and Protestant. I know that early Christian writers such as Tertullian wrote about the atonement in terms of penal substitution, but he doesn't go nearly as far as Anselm his Satisfaction Theory of the atonem