LP's LampPost

I have the great privilege of serving as associate pastor at Union Hill Baptist Church.  I get to preach there quite bit and yesterday I had more sermon than I could get preached!  This blog post is, in part, a continuation of that sermon.  You can listen to the whole thing here  (the sermon starts at 13:20) but I'll give you a quick summary.  Many of us are guilty of evaluating our marriage based on our own happiness.  We can be guilty of considering our spouse's happiness only as it affects our own happiness and we only occasionally consider how God is glorified in our marriage.  To be fair, this last criteria is only a reasonable expectation for Christians but that's who I want to talk to for a minute. God's glory and others' benefit is the primary filter that all our actions should run through to determine whether or not they are good or right.  It is easy, however, to fall into the trap of calling whatever makes me happy good.  Nearly every commercial, ad, an

I am reading You Lost Me by David Kinnaman.  This book is a report on research into the "dropout problem" among young adults in Christian churches in America and some prescriptive thoughts for reaching these dropouts and reorienting our churches around the gospel.  It is a challenging read for a church leader and long-time follower of Jesus like myself.  One of the later chapters has especially spurred my thoughts recently.  The chapter is simply titled "Doubt." Doubt is an interesting phenomenon in the life of a follower of Jesus or even in the life of someone who is considering following Jesus.  We spend a great deal of time as preachers and teachers encouraging people to trust God and "exercise" their faith.  All of this encouragement can, and should, be used to deal with our doubts.  It is my experience, however, that we almost never address doubt directly and I spend a lot of time preaching and teaching.  By contrast, I've said and heard someth

Folks who have known me for a while have probably heard me carry on about the "r-word" at some point.  I had no idea that my personal carrying on had a national campaign.  Today is designated as the annual day of awareness for using (or not using) "retarded."  You can learn more at r-word.org (their site is very slow, maybe just today) and I encourage you to check it out.  This is personal to me as I have a 14-year-old son with Cerebral Palsy and severe Developmental Delay.  He is an individual with an intellectual disability.  Retardation is a literal description of a medical condition.  It has come to be used as an insult or joke.  I appreciate you considering eliminating it from your vocabulary.  If you really want to go above and beyond, pay attention to how you use "special" as well.