Smallest Seed

Reddit It has so little to do with the preacher, if any. Believe me. In fact, I think it has NOTHING to do at all with the preacher or program. I've listened to a lot of boring preachers but I didn't doze off. Lousy programs bore me but I don't get sleepy during worship programs--though I'd be aching to go home ASAP. Sleeping in bed is better. You're sleepy simply because you're sleepy. You're either tired or lazy. Worse, you're carnal. By God's grace, people are wide awake when I preach. Probably they watch and wonder about my gray hair or red nose. On some occasions, I catch 2 or 3 sleepers and I let them enjoy their nap. Some preachers would be offended. Not me. Like Paul, I'd let them sleep and fall off from the third floor. After they regain consciousness, they become totally changed. Some are honestly tired. They did something important Saturday night, spent overtime on it and I understand that. Some unthinking companies requ

Public Domain Pictures Human theology puts God in a box. More so this thing they call hermeneutics . I studied hermeneutics just to find out why they put it on a high pedestal and worship it as a god. They say you can't interpret the bible without these two, practically negating the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. If you tell them this, they'd concede a little and say that theology and hermeneutics depend on the Holy Spirit or the Holy Spirit uses theology and hermeneutics. Do they? Does HE? Just look at "contextualization." Why did Jesus cut-short Isaiah 61? Shouldn't he have quoted the whole verse and also mention about proclaiming   "the year of the LORD's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn," to complete verse 2. In fact, he should've quoted up to verse 3 to complete the work of the Messiah. Another is the passage on Jesus being God's Son "called out of Egypt" [Matthew 2.15].

Pexels Whatever good or fun things we have on earth is really but a poor version of what's in heaven. Never think that what we have here are originals. Nope, they first became realities in heaven before some smart guys came up with the ideas here---as God permitted them. Like residual blessings in Christ. Residual income is a big marvel in network marketing. Your account goes on making money for you even when you've stopped working it out. Residual means abiding and enduring. Something keeps being left in your reserve after you've long stopped doing the business. It never ends. But long before it became a reality in network marketing, it's been a reality in Kingdom rewards systems. Through a Glass Darkly Have you noticed how the principle of duplication has become a top strategy in network marketing? Well, long before the computer and the internet came to being, duplication has been used by the Kingdom since creation. Binary, unilevel, points-system or

Pexels First, don't get me wrong. I'm not promoting small. I never say don't evangelize. In fact, I always stress Jesus' style of evangelism and discipleship in church. What I'm against is greed and the idea that big alone has God's favor. Share the Gospel all you want, but remember that small is powerful in Christ. Because it's really BIG---CHRIST in you is the hope of glory. The least is the greatest, said Jesus, and what do we consider lagging behind, insignificant or least today? What else but small churches. People think small churches lack favor from God just because they're small and moneyless. But they're moneyless because most big ones are greedy. If we get rid of greed and obey Jesus, all churches (especially moneyed and propertied churches) will give up their wealth and give to poor ones. You Won't See the Kingdom Landscape with Big Kingdom Landscape in the last days. Click here. Then they'll begin to understand

Pexels To a lot of people, a ministry favored by God is peopled, moneyed and garbed with impressive facilities. To them that's a growing church. If you're one of them, you'd always look for these things when searching for a church or when sizing up one because smart Alecks say it's how you know if your ministry is in God's will. But this standard is nowhere in the bible. It's man's invention. A church led by the Holy Spirit cannot be measured in the flesh or by any earthly measurement. God looks at it quite differently. To him, it's all spiritual because God is spirit. Going solely by spiritual merits is how you know if your ministry is in God's will or not. Here are 7 signs to watch out for: People deepen in the Word and make it always the priority. People live the Jesus LIFE and character. People give up everything. People don't care about programs. Church uses money on people, not buildings. Church operates in the 5-f

Pexels Part 1 Here Is Being Small Sin? They've made it a doctrine that small is sin. They won't admit it but it's there. Most pastors lose sleep over it. They lose their health, happiness and temper wondering how not to be small. It's become these pastors' number one fear---being a small church. They think small is "dead" especially if you remain small. Some smart Aleck inculcated into their minds that God gets so angry when they're small. Actually, it's nowhere in Scriptures. Yes, God wants us to evangelize and make disciples of as many people as we can, but he never commanded anywhere that, "thou shalt be a big local church!" Numbers and growth remain God's decision alone. He decides the size of your church. Your only responsibility is to be faithful with what you're given, period. So, you shouldn't fear having a small church or even losing members. No reason for pastors' number one fear. So neither the one w

Image from  Tenth Amendment Center. Most pastors, no matter how fearless or unperturbed they seem in ministry, have this number one fear---fear of losing members. A dwindling membership. In fact, a lot of them sacrifice their lives and families and plunge headlong to ministry, not because they love Jesus and lost souls, but because they fear losing membership. It's most pastor's number one fear. They fear having a small church. Well, not all of them, but most of them. Be free from the slavery of that fear. Click here. Something close to that is another pastors' greatest fear---no church at all. Because to them, having just 2 or three followers is not church. They laugh if you call that a church, especially if you quote Matthew 18:20---they'd say you're out of context. I've seen pastors, thinking they're smart theologians, laugh at this "uncontextualized" interpretation. You don't need human theology to understand this---you j

DeviantArt Second Part Here Peter didn't like the idea how Jesus would suffer a lot, be humiliated and killed. He corrected Jesus about it. But Jesus rebuked him, equating him with Satan because his mind was only on man's concerns, not God's. Anything that serves only human needs and concerns is satanic, says Jesus, and that's where the church is headed for---man's glory. It has nothing to do whatsoever with Jesus' great commission, though they may be actively involved in "evangelism." That isn't God's plan at all. God's Strategy for Kingdom Come For the Kingdom to come ( Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven ), the church needs to live the Beatitudes on a natural, daily basis, where being least is glorified, being allied with the weak, the oppressed and belittled. Go over the Sermon and you'd see how God sees "Thy Kingdom come" coming about. It comes when we finally appreciate that havin

Shazoo.Ru For many years they've made Matthew 28.19-20 as Jesus' Great Commission, making disciples. But the idea was just humanly decided. Jesus never mentioned it as his "great commission" to the church. So I can also safely make my own great-commission selection . Any believer can. And I believe Jesus' first great commission is in Matthew 6. First Great Commission It's really "Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." That's Jesus' prayer and it reflected his true mission on earth. To bring down the Kingdom of the Holy God on earth, make it fully operational here, and make heaven a genuine reality on earth. It's a supernatural commission. God's sons and daughters are the ones tasked here (that's why we pray "Our heavenly Father" ) and should have this mission-vision at heart. That's Jesus' first great commission. And the second one---making disciples of all nations---

Image from cnet.com "...and the Word was with God." It's the foremost reason why we cannot afford to ignore the Word. There was nothing and no one in the beginning but God and the Word. Before anything else came to being---when there was nothing but deep black emptiness (in fact, "emptiness" and "black" didn't even exist)---there was God and the Word. The Word was already there with God. The Word was God . So, God was with God in the beginning. Sometimes, I like to read it "In the beginning was God and God was with the Word, and God was the Word." It makes you see more how the Word takes prominence in it all. You cannot just go content in the morning with your 15-minute "devotion" if you understand this. You'd see clearly why the Word must be meditated day and night. There's so much to know about Him that even a lifetime wouldn't suffice to cover even a third of it---even if we lived 100 lifetimes--

Image above from Inside Higher ED. Paul said guard your life and doctrine closely. And this is understood as doctrines found in the bible, nothing more, since there were no denominational doctrines in Paul's time. All churches believed one and the same set of bible doctrines, which was consistent with Jesus' prayer in John 17.23---complete unity of all believers. But then one day, actual experience in life began contradicting bible truths. Things said in the bible didn't happen to them. Real life contradicted what the bible said. And as more church people experienced this, they concluded that truth should be adjusted to their experience. That should solve the conflict. But the problem was, different folks had different experiences. This becomes the problem when you adjust truth to your experience rather than adjust experience to God's truth. So they adjusted Scriptures to their own experiences. One group found it hard to experience real holiness, so they

Image from Pulpit and Pen. The weakness of the church these days is that it has almost totally done away with spiritual discernment and embraced extreme moral neutrality. It doesn't want to be labeled judgmental so it totally got rid of judgment. You seldom hear the church say plainly what's right or wrong for fear of offending people. In the process, it demonized the word "judgment" with everything bad, forgetting that you can never discern accurately without good judgment, and vice versa. If they find you guilty of judging people, they scorn and ostracize you as "judgmental" (and that in itself is being judgmental, too). But fact is, we need to judge things and people correctly to accurately discern between spirits. Blind Leading the Blind Paul was once pissed off by the Corinthian church for not judging correctly: Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to