Somewhere along the line, you've probably heard someone say, "Don't bother looking for the perfect church. Because if you ever find it, and you JOIN it, then it won't be perfect anymore!" The perfect church doesn't exist, but we're tempted to think that the church that emerged in Jerusalem was about as perfect as a church can be. We romanticize that church. We tend to thi...

To those in the West, the bigger the number of respondents, the more replicated the technique. Westerners are enamored by size, largest number of hands raised, and so on. When the sun has set on these reports, we seem rather dismayed when the statistics show the quality of the life of the believer is no different than that of the unbeliever. Ravi Zacharias Congregat...

We have been talking about our work of evangelism for a while, so this Sunday I plan to look at the idea of rest. Our sermon text will be Exodus 16, where God first teaches Israel to observe the Sabbath as a way to rest on God's promises. The Sabbath is a difficult topic, because Bible-believing Christians often disagree on how the Sabbath applies to us today. I hope to fo...

My wife Kerra is a teacher. On the first day of class, she communicated something to her students that got their attention, something that will deeply impact their perspective of what school is all about. "My purpose," she says, "is not to fill your heads with information. My purpose is to make your souls rich." That's a very important lesson for students everywhere. But i...

Years ago, in my freshman year of Bible College, I took a course in personal evangelism. Part of the instruction was lecture, but another part of the class involved simulation. We were assigned to get into small clusters, with someone assuming the role of the evangelist, someone assuming the role of the person being evangelized, and someone else assuming the role of the ev...

Knock, knock, knock. Someone was at the door. Probably a salesman. No one else would ever find their way to our house. I was in my first year of ministry. Kerra and I lived in the church parsonage, which was on a lonely road seven miles from the nearest gas station. The church I served didn't have an office, so I established my workplace in one of the bedrooms. Knock, kno...

Each Sunday, we normally recite a question and answer from the New City Catechism. Sometimes we recite a creed together, like the Nicene Creed or the Apostles' Creed? Why do we do that? All Christians want to think that their beliefs are of biblically sound doctrine. However, a recent study from LifeWay Research suggests that evangelicals believe several heretical claim...

Effective evangelism begins with persevering prayer. So, if we are going to reach out to people, we must first reach up to God. In this session, we will consider why prayer is so vital. Our text this week is from Ephesians 6:10-20. It's a familiar passagethe armor of God. Paul goes through a thorough list of the equipment we need to engage in spiritual warfare. At the end...

This Sunday, we'll be talking about God's gospel plan. I might use the word "story" instead of "plan." It's essentially the same thing. A plan is just a story, written in future tense. Stories are important. Without stories, facts and figures are just isolated points of data with no significance. Stories are what give shape and meaning to our lives. Even the Bible is ...

Who are we reaching? That's the question we're considering this week in our series, Gospel Shaped Outreach. What kind of impact are we having on our community? Regrettably, I would have to say that we aren't reaching many, if any at all. That's a problem. I consider myself to be most at fault in this problem. While I repeatedly preach the gospel from the pulpit, I am no...