Savedthroughfaith.com

In my last two posts, I’ve talked about “pastoring” people. In one, I suggested that it is impossible for someone to shepherd hundreds or thousands of people. (See “The dangers of ‘pastoring’ hundreds or thousands.”) In the other, I suggested that we often consider the wrong things when we look for leaders among the church. (See “But he has an MDiv and ordination pap...

Jamal from “illuminate” has written a very good post called “Please Pray For Our Elders…” It goes along very well with my previous post “The dangers of ‘pastoring’ hundreds or thousands.” But, in his post, Jamal tackles head-on something that I only intimated in my post: simply giving someone a title or position as “pastor” or “elder” or...

For most of my 30 plus years of experience in the church, “pastoring” was a function relegated to one or two (perhaps a few) and towards hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of people. So, on the average, one person was responsible for “pastoring” hundreds of others, while those hundreds were primarily responsible for being pastored. From what I’ve seen in seminary and from the books and a...

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had something wonderful happen a few times – two that stand out. Each time, I was talking with someone who was struggling with relational or emotional issues. And, each time, the other person ended up encouraging me in Jesus Christ. But, then, this is the way the Holy Spirit works through his children if we recognize that we are in mutual discipling relationships ̵...

Last week, I published a guest post by Greg Gamble called “Identifying with the Shunammite.” Now, I want to highlight something else that Greg wrote. This time, Greg left a comment on my post “Scripture… As We Live It #202” which was a re-mix of Titus 3:10-11 – a passage about divisive people. But, I want his comment to get more notice, so I’m publishing it here as a ̶...

I’ve invited several people to write “guest blog posts” for this blog. There are several reasons for this: 1) To offer different perspectives. 2) To generate even more discussion and conversation between blogs. 3) To introduce other bloggers to my readers. (If you are interested in writing a guest blog post, please contact me at aknox[at]sebts[dot]com.) Today’s post was written by Andrew Brims....

Have you ever been reading through the Gospels and realized that (obviously) Jesus forgot the conditional statements… again? Or, if he didn’t forget to say the conditional statements, then someone forgot to write them down. You know what I mean, right? Like when he said, “Take up your cross daily and follow me.” He forgot the conditional statement about having a bad day, or facing a person ...

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how we tend to dehumanize and depersonalize following Jesus. What do I mean? I mean that we are find with loving everyone, but he often have trouble loving that specific person. But, we must understand that failing to love that specific person IS failing at love. In the same way, we often consider our work – our service, perhaps – to the masses, but fail at workin...

In this short series, I’ve looked into various characteristics of life in which followers of Jesus Christ are to persevere. I said that we should persevere through temptation, forgiveness, grace, and trials. But, these are not the only things that the authors of Scripture exhorted their readers to persevere. For example, they also said to persevere in love (John 13:34-35), unity (Philippians 2:1-2), peace (R...

In honor of my sixth blogiversary – which I celebrated a few days ago – I’m “replaying” the post “Willing to be impacted by others” which I first published six years ago during the first week of this blog. It’s a short post… I didn’t write as much back then. But, I think the point is very important. Yes, it’s important for us to be willing to get in...