Josh Hunt's Blog, page 205
October 12, 2018
Actions Are Not the Essence of Worship
Or consider the way Jesus talks about the heart worshiping him. “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me” (Mark 7:6–7). In other words, external actions—even religious ones directed toward God—are not the essence of worship. They are not the essence of love. […]
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October 11, 2018
The gospel according to you
What is the gospel according to you? We all—religious or not—build our lives on some gospel, some “good news” that we believe can redeem our existence. Maybe it’s money or success or reputation or health or marriage. Everybody has a gospel. This is Jesus’ gospel: God is present here and now. God is acting. You […]
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What is the application?
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October 10, 2018
What would Jesus do?
A quick reading of the New Testament will give you an easy answer to that question. The scene is Jesus with His disciples. The mother of James and John, identified in the text as “the mother of Zebedee’s sons,” addresses Jesus. She speaks boldly to Him: “Promise that these two sons of mine may sit, […]
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Forgotten God
If I were Satan and my ultimate goal was to thwart God’s kingdom and purposes, one of my main strategies would be to get churchgoers to ignore the Holy Spirit. The degree to which this has happened (and I would argue that it is a prolific disease in the body of Christ) is directly connected […]
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October 9, 2018
Loving God as Treasuring Him
Now let me try to unpack it and defend it. Why do I define loving God mainly as treasuring God? Why do I believe that love for God is most essentially an experience of the affections, not mere thought or mere behavior? When Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John […]
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October 8, 2018
What is the gospel?
So what is the Good News that Jesus himself proclaimed? When that question was first posed to me, I had been a pastor for many years. I had been through seminary and then some. I was a “licensed minister of the gospel,” and if you are licensed in something, you should understand it. Yet I […]
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October 7, 2018
How to close the back door of your church
Several years ago, I had my own wake-up call about the power of groups when I was leading a research project. I would report the research in my book, High Expectations. I asked my research team to review the records of hundreds of church members who had joined their churches five years earlier. We then […]
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October 6, 2018
Loving God
He is my loving God and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield, in whom I take refuge, who subdues peoples under me (Psalm 144:2). FYI: This is a very personal psalm from David. Saul had hunted David for years in order to kill him. David even had to live among the Philistines, […]
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