I wear plaid. I'm a blogger.

I was reading through the book of John today and was struck by how much the Jews seemed to despise Jesus (see John 10:22-42 for an example). Here's why I think I'm so surprised by this: The Jews were familiar with the messianic prophecies in the Scriptures. They were under Roman rule which meant that they were unable to worship God in the ways they wanted to. They had to bow to Caesar and worship him so they were under religious oppression as well as political. And yet....when Jesus shows up on the scene, fulfills the prophecies and preaches that He is the Son of God, the people want to kill him. Why is that? The Pharisees and religious leaders were expecting a political leader to step up and deliver Israel from Roman oppression. Jesus was strangely fulfilling the prophecies and all signs pointed to Him to be the messiah, and yet Jesus preached a gospel of peace. He preached of a world where you pray for enemies. He preached of going the literal extra mile , of the Kingdom ...

Ephesians 1:5 says that we have been adopted into sonship with God through Jesus Christ. As we enter that sonship, we take on a new name: Christian. And we love to march around telling the world we are Christians and that we live with Christian principles and Christian morals and a Christian government and Christian families and on and on it goes. But have you ever wondered what it means--really means--to call yourself a Christian? To call yourself a Christian is to acknowledge that you have died to your own self and taken on a new name, the name of Christ. So what if, instead of calling ourselves Christians (an overused term which really has little by way of accurately labeling your belief system) we called ourselves CHRISTIAMS?* ChristIAm Think about it. Romans 8:11 says that "the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you", and if Christ is living in me and I bear his name and I have this same power living in me, then I can walk around claiming...

Have you ever made a photocopy of a photocopy and then realized how terrible the end result was? There was a day when copy machines had such bad dpi that every copy of a copy resulted in a poor final print. Modern copy machines provide a much clearer image the first time around that is capable of duplicating itself much more cleanly. And here's the big realization: there are buzzwords floating around churches and "feel good" circles that encourage you to multiply yourself--rub off on other people in such a way that you change them in a good way. However, I don't think that should be our end goal. We shouldn't be seeking to find ways to multiply ourselves but rather just to duplicate ourselves. I allude to this in an earlier blogpost about the effectiveness of always mentoring one person at a time. But the idea of duplication helps me to better understand why this is effective. You see, if you try to capture multiple images in one screenshot, invariably you wi...