Why did Jesus chose men to lead the Church?

Because He planned for them to die. Every. Single. One. The apostles were chosen to be martyrs. They were chosen to lose their families, to lose their reputations, to lose their homes, to be mocked and misunderstood, beaten and rejected and killed.

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To lead the Church is to follow on the heels of Jesus who was lied about, betrayed by a friend, rejected by family, constantly misunderstood, and ultimately convicted of crimes He didn’t commit, beaten to a bloody pulp, and executed naked on a Roman cross.

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In other words, if we want to insist that ordained ministry and leadership in the church is something for men, we need to prove it by doing the hard and dangerous work of following Jesus. For some that means spending a lot more time in prayer. Pray like it’s your job. Pray like it matters. Pray for hours. Pray like a man. Some need to get out of their offices and preach the gospel. Go find unbelievers. Go talk to them. Go to the LBGTQ luncheons and preach Jesus. Go find a street corner. Go next door. You’ll be misunderstood. You’ll be laughed at. You’ll be ignored. You’ll be rejected. You’ll begin to be a man. Some need to address actual sin in their congregations. Name it, explain it, condemn it, and point to Jesus who frees us from all sin. People might misunderstand. People might leave. There might be a church split. Good, then maybe you can learn to be a man.

Totally superb post. Read the full thing here

Why the Church exists

May I come back to what I said before? This is the whole of Christianity. There is nothing else. It is so easy to get muddled about that. It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects—education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects—military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden— that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; Harper Collins: 1997) 164. 

This year, fight for a kid's right to lose

Whether your kid loves Little League or gymnastics, ask the organizers this: “Which kids get awards?” If the answer is, “Everybody” find another program.

Of all people, The NYT challenges that prevalent trend in our culture, that of letting everyone win. One of their big concerns is that widespread recognition leads the talented children to be demoralised whilst those who are average/not that good eventually work it out and also give up. In other words kids at both end of the spectrum end up under performing. They therefore conclude:

 

When children make mistakes, our job should not be to spin those losses into decorated victories. Instead, our job is to help kids overcome setbacks, to help them see that progress over time is more important than a particular win or loss, and to help them graciously congratulate the child who succeeded when they failed. To do that, we need to refuse all the meaningless plastic and tin destined for landfills. We have to stop letting the Trophy-Industrial Complex run our children's lives.

 This school year, let's fight for a kids's right to lose.

Read the whole thing here

Vinegar is charged with the grandeur of God

The British Geneticist J.B.S. Haldane was once asked what his study of biology had taught him about God. He replied that the Creator, if he exists, has "an inordinate fondness for beetles." Although he was rank pagan of the highest degree his answer nonetheless points to an inescapable truth: that the world is filled with unimaginable wonder, right from the tiniest speckle to the largest boulder. As Gerald Manley Hopkins so memorably put it "The world is charged with the grandeur of God." It shouldn't have surprised me therefore to find out how so simple a thing as vinegar is so fantastically versatile and tremendously useful. Watch the video below and be amazed...

How to improve your preaching

Wise words from John Wesley:

“What has exceedingly hurt you in time past, nay, and I fear to this day, is want of reading. I scarce ever knew a preacher read so little. And perhaps, by neglecting it, you have lost the taste for it. Hence your talent in preaching does not increase. It is just the same as it was seven years ago. It is lively, but not deep; there is little variety, there is no compass of thought. Reading only can supply this, with meditation and daily prayer. You wrong yourself greatly by omitting this. O begin! Fix some part of every day for private exercises. You may acquire the taste which you have not: what is tedious at first, will afterwards be pleasant. Whether you like it or no, read and pray daily. It is for your life; there is no other way; else you will be a trifler all your days, and a petty, superficial preacher.”

John Wesley, letter to John Pemboth, August 17, 1760.

The longing

We live in a world shattered,

Each step re-echoes the cracking of broken glass,

Shards removed at first from aching feet

But then…finally…tolerated.

Longing to recover the tranquil garden of gentle grass.

We all long for things to be made RIGHT.  Ever since Adam was expelled from the Garden, humanity has been longing for what was lost - the tranquil feel of gentle grass on weary limbs. As horrific events unfold in my home town and more news comes in of a dastardly attack on Christians in Pakistan it's impossible not to long for wickedness to cease: for swords to be turned into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks, AK47s into butter knives. Sin has truly shattered the ocean depth of happy rest we once enjoyed and now we all long for the calm from the chaos to commence.

But where will such calm be found? Where will ugliness be transformed to beauty? Where will fractured relationships be turned into harmony and falsehood swallowed up by truth? The answer is simple - only in Christ. What Sin has profoundly torn apart, God, through Christ is reconciling to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven. He is the Creator and Re-Creator, the Redeemer and the Reconciler. He is the One who fully satisfies the longing soul. Only He Who entered the broken-glass world with the gentleness from above could remove the shards of our souls, recovering for us the tranquil garden of gentle grass.

Abortion: run away, don't throw the life away

Incredible how many different emotions you'll experience watching this!