Tag Archives: Church at Ephesus

The Message Is the Medium

An excerpt from The Gospel Coalition:

The medium is the message. This is the idea Neil Postman popularized 25 years ago when he dropped his literary bombshell, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Obviously we Americans could do with less entertainment, whether it’s Netflix, FarmVille, or our insatiable appetite for sports. But Postman wasn’t critiquing entertainment per se; he was critiquing our attempts to deal with serious matters through it. His thesis: We live in an age not of exposition but of entertainment, making thoughtful interaction essentially impossible, since light media can’t support serious ideas.

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Christianity: Not For The Faint-Hearted

Starting a new job is tough. It doesn’t matter what you do or who you work for, the transition is hard. The work itself may not be the problem. Maybe it’s finding the best route to work to avoid traffic. Maybe it’s realizing that there’s no way to avoid it, and having to sit in a parking lot called a highway for an hour before and after work! Maybe it’s finding the good places to eat for lunch and still get back inside of an hour. It’s not any of those for me. There’s only one reason I’ve ever started a new job: more money. Now, this may flesh out in ending a season of unemployment, by God’s grace, or being offered a position after being at the same place for a while, but the motivation has generally been the same. I’ve recently ended one of those seasons of unemployment by accepting a help desk/entry level programming position. The work has a learning curve, but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is fighting the idols of comfort, security, and stability to make sure that I spend my money in a way that glorifies God.

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Ephesians 2:1-3

I apologize for it taking so long to post this. This blog is going to be fairly academic in nature, and I was trying to find a way to communicate the appropriate emotion behind it so that it wouldn’t seem so matter-of-fact as it’s such an important text. Then over time, I just forgot about it. Over the past few weeks, though, through the course of conversations with some people, I really became pressed with how much we love our sin. This realization drove me back to this text, and I decided that I needed to go ahead and post this as is, and hope that the heart behind it comes across.

If you’re new to the blog, or just need a refresher, it may help to review what we’ve already covered in the Ephesians series (scroll to the bottom of the page to get to the first post).

Alright, we left off in the previous blog stating that Paul, at a high level, compares our salvation to Christ’s resurrection to communicate the drastic change that took effect at our salvation. GOD MADE US ALIVE! We were spiritually dead because of sin and God breathed life into our very soul. He resurrected us from our spiritually dead state and made us alive in Christ Jesus. So not only will we be resurrected physically as Jesus was, but we have already been resurrected spiritually.

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God Of Victory

Since I was 14 music has played a key role in my life. I never really made it into the musician world due to lack of rhythm and/or coordination, but I have always loved how music can make or break a movie, set an atmosphere, make rush hour traffic almost tolerable, and even set the mood for a church service. This can be done through instrumental pieces alone, or by compelling lyrics to drive home the message the pastor delivered. One of the things that I love about being a member of The Village Church is their commitment to not only have excellent musicians, but deep theology in the lyrics of the songs they choose when leading us in worship. Which is why I am elated about the release of their new worship album, God Of Victory.

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The Sovereignty of God in our Suffering

When we think about suffering, we are prone to think about how bad it feels, to become inward focused, to ask “Why me?”. When we actually experience suffering, we flesh out the values that we really hold to be true: whether we really believe that God is of first importance, or if we naively believe that the world should revolve around us. We rarely ever stop to think about anything outside of ourselves. We often don’t stop to realize there’s a bigger picture, and a purpose behind the pain.

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