Wellington Church of Christ

In the long history of the Church, there is only one teaching strategy that I have ever approved of in order to lead others to salvation, which is, to teach salvation in the same manner as Jesus.

Jesus’ teaching on salvation was not popular in His time and it certainly is not popular in our time.  Why not?  One reason is because His teaching regarding salvation often sounded like He was discouraging people to follow Him instead of encouraging them.

The Biblical teaching regarding children and our responsibilities to them is clear.  What are we doing to live out the Biblical teaching? 

Here is a checklist of things to remember regarding children from the Bible:

A trend that I find bizarre in churches is when its members get upset at the teaching of God’s Word. 

I’m not talking about the false teaching of the Word.  I’m not talking about when people get upset because of a harsh delivery of the Word either.  I can understand people being upset, rightly, about those things.

What I’m referring to is the thoughtful, skillful, kind and precise teaching of the Word that still upsets the believer.

Have you ever had your debt purchased?  That sounds like such a bizarre concept, but it happens all of the time.

Such a thing has happened to me many times already.  I used to be a part of a credit union that was purchased by another bank.  I received a letter in the mail that basically explained that I now owed money to a different institution.  The same thing happened with my college student loans.  If I recall correctly, that debt was purchased by a few different banks before I finally paid off the debt.

There is a big push in the evangelical world today to extinguish the teachings of some of the Bible by means of other teachings of the Bible.

This is nothing new.  If mankind can be said to have excelled at anything, we have excelled in the justification of our actions.

We’re on the fifth lesson of our current series, “The Advanced Lessons,” and we have a ways to go, so I thought it would be a good idea to do a quick refresher.

What is this series about, again?  We’ve reached the transitional turning point in Jesus’ ministry where he’s turned His focus away from the crowds to His disciples.  He’s preparing them with the final lessons they need to learn before beginning their own ministries.

Here’s what we covered in this series thus far:

One of the worst things about living in this world is the spiritually numbing effect that we experience.  What do I mean?  Let’s begin by defining what it means to be “numb.”

The adjective form of the word numb is defined as: deprived of the power of sensation.  The verb form of the word numb is defined as: deprived of feeling or responsiveness.

Isn’t it amazing how we can be so wrong about so many important things?  Before you get mad at me, consider Jesus’ greatest sermon, what we call, the Sermon on the Mount. 

He begins the sermon by explaining to us the origins of true happiness and his prescription for happiness is nothing like any human being would ever imagine.

I think of life as a test mainly because of the Book of Job.  In this largely ignored and misunderstood book of the Bible, it begins with a host of angels presenting themselves before the Lord.  We don’t understand exactly why, but we do know that angels are God’s servants.  Perhaps they are answering to God for what they’ve been doing.

History has proven that there is nothing more challenging to the church than what we refer to as the “gray” areas of scripture.  What does that mean?  Gray areas are things that the scripture does not specifically address.

In contrast, we refer to the areas in scripture that are clear as the “black and white” areas.  An example of a black and white issue would be something like Exodus 20:15,