By Sharon Kraemer. An extraordinary and much-loved couple has concluded nine years of involvement with the PCA program committees. Dr. William R. Read turned sixty-five last August, but he agreed to continue working for MNA and MTW until he had com
Seniors
The Love of God and Evangelism
By D. Clair Davis. Why is it so hard to share the Gospel? What gets in the way? Is it because you don’t know how? That’s not a big obstacle anymore. If you need training, it’s there. Evangelism Explosion helps you to encourage people to talk first about what they think is the Gospel. Otherwise, you catch yourself doing all the talking and then wondering what they mean when people nod their heads. It helps to know things like that.
Or do you wonder if the Lord is calling you to this? Are the elders the only soldiers we have, or do they show the rest of us the way? If you have questions about every member ministry in general, then you really do when it comes specifically to evangelism. When the Bible says the Gospel is to be preached to the whole world, it’s easy to react by saying, “Thank God for preachers” and then write another check. Maybe you need to work that through. But knowing the how and who isn’t a lot of help unless you see why. You can’t think straight about evangelism until you’ve grasped what the Gospel is about. This is the issue. t always has been. There is such a thing as resenting it when other people are saved – or at least not being full of joy praying about their salvation. Work through the New Testament again. The Gospels tell you what the Lord says to Phar
The Promise of the Cross
By Faythe A. Dobbs. The event of the cross is unique in that it is an accomplished fact; yet it bears a promise that was looked to with expectation before it happened, and now we also look to this promise. Promise, in one sense, is an agreement to do (or not do) something. Because of the cross and Christ’s work there, I can put my trust in Him.I agree to join in covenant relationship with Him. Promise, in another sense, means to give a basis for expectation. What can we expect as a result of the cross for our lives?
The word cross itself evokes thoughts of suffering and pain. During this time of year especially, we think of Christ on the cross. And when we hear the verse about bearing our own cross, it is hard to respond enthusiastically. But how many of us see the cross as a way to joy? Certainly Christ saw the cross as necessary to the attainment of joy. Hebrews 12:2 says that Jesus “who for the joy set before him endured the cross.”
How do I personally envision the cross? Is there promise in the cross for me, or is my focus on an event that happened 2,000 years ago with little eternal significance? Sometimes I can empathize with C. S. Lewis who, soon after his conversion, said, “The irrational dead weight of old skeptical habits, the spirit of this age and the cares of this world steal away all my lively feeling of the truth.” And I might add -joy! So what present promise does the cross hold for me? I have enough trouble just picturing the event itself. It is hard to put my twentieth-century self- with its sanitized, Americanized mindset – back to the scene at Cal
Building a Case in Prayer
By Richard Pratt. In ordinary conversa
Ministering to the Divorced
By Tom Jones. “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Alien Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.
So began Ralph Ellison’s remarkable novel about being black in America. So also might begin the personal story of countless men and women who have found themselves divorced in the church. They, like Ellison’s invisible man, have felt themselves to be unseen, unknown, untouched. In most cases the church is not guilty of deliberate or even conscious blindness toward the divorced, but the blindness has been real nonetheless. More than anything else this special blindness has come in the form of benign neglect. But benign or not, neglect feels painful to the neglected.
My own divorce is now sixteen years behind me; yet I can still feel the pain of the church’s neglect. Because the church did not reach out to me with meaningful ministry, my personal loneli
Ministering to the Never-Married Single Adult
By Walter Wood. “I never thought I’d be twenty-eight, unmar