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James Petticrew ~ Holy Tenacity
Note from the Editor: This week at Wesleyan Accent, as we scan, with grief, ongoing news from seeker-sensitive Protestant megachurches…
Note from the Editor: This week at Wesleyan Accent, as we scan, with grief, ongoing news from seeker-sensitive Protestant megachurches…
But without the empowering presence of God’s Holy Spirit, according to Wesley, all we have is a dead religiosity.
I doubt there is a more used and less understood word in the contemporary church than “missional.” Missional is not about being better at being Kodak in a digital photograph world.
The danger of our silence is that if we ignore the subject of money, both the mission of the Kingdom of God and the spirituality of God’s people will ultimately be impoverished.
I love that concept, that whenever we pray, “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we are committing ourselves as Christ followers and churches to fashioning foretastes of the world to come in the here and now.
The more I read those words and reflected on Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 25 the more it struck me that the Seven Works of Corporal Mercy are not an anachronistic relic of the Medieval church but constitute a very effective evaluation tool for the contemporary church.
Holiness, because it’s a lifestyle shaped not by the culture we are surrounded by but by a Holy God, is a radically different lifestyle.
Yet day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and decade after decade, Jeremiah persistently did what God had called him to do. He didn’t give up, he didn’t move to a city where people were more responsive, he didn’t modify his message, he persistently carried on doing what God had called on him to do.
He says that “in Christ,” through what Christ has done for us in his life, death and resurrection, through his empowering Spirit and inspiring example and our relationship with Christ, God is recreating, restoring us to what he originally intended us to be. The Greek word that Paul uses literally means a “masterpiece.”