Tag: Christian Living

Christian Living

Lonely Christianity

Chris

According to Adherents.com, Christianity is the largest world religion with two billion adherents (defined as “all members, including full members, their children and the estimated number of other regular participants who are not considered as communicant, confirmed or full members”). According to ReligiousTolerance.org, about 75% of American adults identify themselves under the title Christian.

It’s safe to say there is no shortage of “Christians” in our lives. In many towns and cities, to open the Yellow Pages and look under churches, you’ll find not just a small handful, but pages of listings. And yet, when things happen in our lives, where do we turn?

In most cases, we pull away from everyone. We try to figure things out, working with all our might to fight through some of the most difficult times in our lives. But is that the answer God prescribed for us?

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Christian Living

Mindless Christianity

Chris

The stuff that makes us up as human beings boils down to three parts: spirit, soul/mind, and body. In the Christian world, you don’t have to go very far to find some rules about how we use our body. Don’t go here, don’t eat or drink this, don’t listen to that, don’t say this. . . There is also a lot of talk about what it means to be have our spirit in tune with God. There are teachings (and debate) about what it means to be Spirit-filled, to be lead by the Spirit, to move in the Spirit.

But what about the mind? What role does it play in the Christian life? Are we living a mindless Christianity?

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Christian Living, Ministry

Searching for One’s Self – 4

Chris

This should be my last post on the topic of searching for one’s self. Of course, in relation to all of the self-help books, recordings, and seminars, and what seems to me as the obvious struggle to discover who we are and what we’re supposed to be doing, these posts are really just a drop in the bucket. (And you never know when it’ll resurface here.)

Think back to the post 2, where we talked about three traps that we fall into when it comes discovering and becoming who we are meant to be. We talked about how we get stuck by, (1) what we think we should be on account of the input we are constantly receiving, (3) what others think we should be, and (3) what we want others to think about us, true or not.

There’s one other perspective that we haven’t talked about yet that may have come to mind when you read this list. It’s the topic of this post, and you might be surprised by what gets unpacked here.

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Christian Living, Ministry

Searching for One’s Self – 3

Chris

I was convinced that just two posts would take care of the thoughts I had when it comes to searching for one’s self, but as I prepared to close that second post, a thought came to mind. Many of us have read in Scripture and heard from the pulpit that when we come to believe in Jesus, we live from that point forward “in Christ.”

There are many promises to the believer, being in Christ. I once taught a six-week study on some of them. But I think that we have to be careful when we talk about being in Christ. If we were to take the spiritual word picture literally, to where we would clothe ourselves in Jesus Christ, would it be a one-size-fits-all situation? Let’s take a moment and talk about that.

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Christian Living, Ministry

Searching for One’s Self – 2

Chris

We began a discussion on how difficult it is to learn who we are, who we are meant to be. Part of what we are called to do in »Christ is to complete good works, things that God has already taken the time to put into place and line up so that we can walk into a situation that is ripe for fulfilling what God has asked us to do (see Ephesians 2:10).

But how do we figure out how we fit into those pictures? If God is putting together a grand story that we each have a role in, what does it take to unravel the clues to what it is? It’s like searching for buried treasure, but not only are we often without an easy map to follow, we’re sometimes unclear about what the treasure looks like.

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Christian Living, Ministry

Searching for One’s Self

Chris

We are winding up our second year of our current home group program at church. I’m finishing up my third run of a course based on the study by Rick Rusaw and Eric Swanson entitled, “Living A Life On Loan.” I picked out this DVD study to help emphasize the character quality of fruitfulness. Though it doesn’t line up with my original thoughts on the matter, the study does encourage Christians to use their gifts and abilities in order to dispense grace and good works through their lives.

Discussion in our group will often return to a thought that each person is trying to figure out who they are. Men and women in their thirties and forties are realizing that they’ve go so long living life, either for the Lord or themselves, and now they’re starting to figure out that they have something to do, some gift to bring to the world.

I’d written a couple of posts in recent months on spiritual gifts. I find myself bringing up those thoughts in our discussions, so you might find them interesting (read Spiritual Gifts 1 | read Spiritual Gifts 2). It seems, though, that for all of the tests, for all of the books and programs that are available to help us discover our personal gifts, it is still extremely difficult for people to determine what they are and live their lives doing them.

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