Friday, July 11, 2025

Letter to My Redeemer Family

 



Dear Redeemer Family,

Linda and I fly home today from New York City.

In NYC we have been hosted by our dear friends Dr. John Hao and Rosie Hao.

I preached three times at their annual conference.

They have thirteen services on Sunday (in multiple buildings). I preached at three of them.

Then I taught my Spiritual Transformation class in their seminary from T - Th, 9-4 each day.

Then I went back to our hotel and took a nap.

After each of my messages Linda and I prayed for people to be healed. After Sunday's 2 PM sermon we prayed for people for two and a half hours. 

Then we went back to our hotel and took a nap.

I may share some of the things that happened at our Redeemer worship service this coming Sunday morning.

If you prayed for us, thank you. God is good!

Love,

PJ

(I just posted this to my blog. 54 Thoughts About Prayer)

54 Thoughts About Prayer


(Our front yard - snow in April!)





1.  You will learn more about prayer by actually praying than you can get from a book.
2.  Prayer is talking with God about what God and I are thinking and doing together.
3.  Praying is revolutionary activity whereby I revolt against the kingdom of this world as I meet with the true Lord of heaven and earth.
4.  If you believe God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then you believe God is powerful enough and knows enough to address your struggles.
5.  If you believe that God is all-loving, then you believe that God desires to address your struggles.
6.  What we think about God affects how we worship and pray.
7.  Prayer is not a religious duty, something I “have” to do, but a relationship with God.
8.  In praying I must let go of control and trust God.
9.  The focus of praying is not prayer itself, but God.
10.             I can meet God at a conference. I can also meet the same God wherever I am.
11.             Assume God is doing something in you, now.
12.             Praying is the act of interfacing this world with the kingdom of God.
13.             I can hear the voice of God, speaking to me.
14.             Hearing God’s voice is a function of intimacy with God.
15.             Humility is needed to hear the voice of God.
16.             Discernment is the capacity to recognize and respond to the presence and activity of God, both in the ordinary moments of life and in the larger decisions of life.
17.             As intimacy with God increases, discernment increases.
18.             Discerning should always come before deciding.
19.             In praying, God changes me.
20.             I pray to be able to see God’s Bigger Picture of my life and reality.
21.             I pray for my heart to be shaped into a heart of God’s love.
22.             Praying for people is a God-given, holy burden.
23.             In praying I bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.
24.             I pray for others because I believe that where prayer focuses, power falls.
25.             Blessed are the mono-taskers, for they shall see God.
26.             Praying is a slow-cooker, not a microwave.
27.             Teaching people to pray in solitude is one of the greatest needs and challenges of the church today.
28.             Solitary times with God prepare us for fellowship with people.
29.             If you commit to praying God will lead you deeper into community.
30.             One’s personal prayer life can never be understood if it is separated from community life.
31.             In praying we cry for the in-breaking of the kingdom into the brokenness of the present.
32.             In praying God aligns our heart with his kingdom heart.
33.             To pray is to explore and venture into the vast, limitless regions of God’s beautiful kingdom.
34.             Authentic praying is an act of self-denial.
35.             To pray is to let go of control.
36.             When God reveals personal faults it is never to condemn us, but only to rescue us.
37.             There is a “spiritual Alzheimer’s disease” which results in forgetting the many times God has rescued and delivered us.
38.             A main antidote to fear is remembering.
39.             In praying I enumerate things I am thankful for and give thanks to God.
40.             I pray because Jesus prayed.
41.             I pray for protection and guidance.
42.             In praying I am detoxified and released from burdens.
43.             Renewal can begin with one follower of Jesus, praying.
44.             The more Westernized a person is, the less they pray.
45.             Prayvailing – Travailing prayer brings prevailing in a person’s life.
46.             I need to set aside some time very day for active talking and listening to God. Just ten minutes each day can bring about a radical change in my life.
47.             Nothing can stop me from praying today.
48.             If I humble myself and pray, turning from any wicked ways, God will hear from heaven and heal the land.
49.             The antidote to spiritual burnout is time alone with God, praying.
50.             Pray even when, especially when, it seems or feels like God is absent.
51.             God isn’t in a panic room when you or I have doubts.
52.             Life is best lived when death is acknowledged.
53.             Kick the “bucket list” and live for a greater purpose.
54.             How a life begins and ends is important. Don’t forget the ending part. 



Thursday, July 10, 2025

A Disciple Grows in Discernment

 

 


I began taking guitar lessons at age five. I have taught and played guitar for sixty-nine years. (How old am I?)

How familiar am I with guitars? Very! I am able to discern whether a guitar is in tune, or out of tune. I can hear chords played, and without looking at the guitar being played, tell you what chord it is. (Mostly, not entirely…) I can listen to a song for the first time, and (mostly) immediately play it. (Really accomplished guitarists do this better than I can.)  

I became a disciple of Jesus just before my twenty-first birthday. I have talked and walked and lived with Jesus for fifty-three years. (How old am I?) Jesus became to me, as one scholar calls him, a “familiar stranger.”

From the beginning, Jesus felt familiar to me. I felt safe, at home, with him. Coming to Jesus was a great homecoming!   

And, just as the first disciples found the ways and words of Jesus strange, like his use of parables, so did I. Yet I, like those disciples, was, and remain, attracted to him.  

I am familiar with Jesus, with more understanding coming daily. I am able to discern what is of Jesus, and what is not of Jesus. The discipleship principle I have learned is:  

Discernment is a function of familiarity.

Discernment is in direct proportion to intimacy.  

I want you to be familiar with our Lord Jesus. I want your spiritual discernment to increase.  

Apprentices become familiar with their teachers. My Teacher has taught me this: The more I know him, the more I see and understand him.  

This is what happens to disciples of Christ. May it be so, in you.


DECLARATIONS  

I am becoming more familiar with Jesus every day.  

I am able to discern spiritual realities.  

I can separate the good from the evil.  

Revelation from Jesus is increasing in me.  

It excites me to think there is so much more to Jesus waiting for me to comprehend.  

There is no greater privilege than knowing Jesus my Lord!


(From my book 31 Letters to the Church on Discipleship)

Saturday, July 05, 2025

Logic and Truth


I'm re-posting this video, in my ongoing attempts to combat postmodern thinking, especially as it infects certain areas of "progressive Christianity." (For example, the idea that orthopraxy is more important than orthodoxy. Or, e.g., the idea that reality is mostly (if not entirely) socially constructed.)

Friday, July 04, 2025

Some Quotes from My Conference Message

 

                                                             (Green Lake, Wisconsin)

At our annual conference's fifty-year anniversary I gave a retrospective on things I have learned at the conference.

Here are some quotes, from some of our past speakers.


Jack Hayford - 1992

“Doors don’t open for the interfacing of the body of Christ until there comes love for the body of Christ.

“The essence of renewal is not the power of the HS. It is the voice of the HS, and responding to it.”

“Teach your people how to respond to the culture non-cynically as healers of that culture.”

“Fears are always liars. They are always prompted by some spirit.”

"You would worry less about what people think of you if you realized how little they do."


Dean Sherman - 1999

“If you want to work with Jesus, build church. If you want to work against Jesus, tear the church down.”


 John Dawson - 1998

“In the absence of the glory, there is an inrush of the demonic.”


Donna Hailson - 2005

“Church is not measured by its attendance but by its deployment.”


Dan Fountsin

"Christianity is the only caring culture in the world.

          Hinduism is not caring.

          Buddhism is not caring.

          Islam is not caring."


Grant Mullen

“Comparison is the rocket fuel of shame.”

         

J. P. Moreland

“The American people are intoxicated with wanting ‘happiness’. 

The emphasis on happiness is not working. 

The paradox of hedonism is: You won’t be happy by trying to be happy.

Happiness is a wonderful byproduct but a terrible goal of life."


Jo McIntyre

"Pray with apostolic authority."


Randy Clark - 2010

“Most of the time when I pray for people to be healed I feel nothing.”

“My faith isn’t in my performance. It’s in God’s Word and what God has told me, not in my performance.”

Rachel Hickson. 

“It’s not about how you feel. It’s about how you are connected.” 


Bill Johnson 

"Prophetic ministry is not to be focused on the sins of the world. It takes very little discernment to find the dirt in people’s lives. The prophetic in its purest form is designed to find the gold in people’s lives and call it to the surface."


Greg Boyd - 2005

“The Kingdom of God always looks like Jesus. Everything hangs on this.”


Leif Hetland - 2013

“The coming move of God is going to be nameless and faceless.”

Leif’s life verse is John 17:26 - I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”


Francis McNutt - 2001

“I can’t measure my success as a minister of the gospel by what people think of me.”

J.P. Moreland  – "McNutt’s book on healing is the best book on the subject ever written."


The great theologian John Wayne - 

"Courage is being afraid but saddling up anyway."



5 MINUTE DISCIPLESHIP - PRAYER

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

God Is Wrathful Because God Is Love

                                                                   (Monroe County)

Yale theologian Miroslav Volf personally witnessed the horrors of the Bosnian war. Out of this context he wrote,

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, mypeople shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days!

​How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.

 Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, (Zondervan 2005) pp. 138-139

As I read this, I thought of H. Richard Niebuhr's famous quote, as he critiqued a soft and shallow theological liberalism.

"A God without wrath

brought men without sin

into a kingdom without judgment

through the ministrations of

a Christ without a cross."

(For more on the love and wrath of God, see Kevin Kinghorn and Stephen Travis, But What About God's Wrath? The Compelling Love Story of Divine Anger.)

Monday, June 23, 2025

JESUS-FOLLOWING, POLITICS, and CULTURE


(Sermon-prepping, in Starbucks.)

















(I'm re-posting this for some friends.)

I had a recent encounter with a person, call them X.


X: "I am against socialism."

Me: "Can you explain socialism to me?"

X: "No."

Me: "Can you tell me what socialism is?"

X: [SILENCE]

Me: "Do you find it odd to be against something you know nothing about?"

Politically, America is deeply divided. As a follower of Jesus, how do I evaluate this? What do I do about this? How shall I think about this?

Here's my approach, 


1) I identify certain guiding principles; and 

2) I keep studying and learning. 

This means disengaging from social media arguments, and finding the best scholarship available that can help me, in the first place, understand the issues. I am uninterested in people who want to argue political issues without first putting a lot of work into understanding those issues. This may not be you, but it is me.


A FEW GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR ME

  • Deepen your abiding life in Christ, as the first thing to do. All relevant, Spirit-led action comes from this ongoing attachment to Christ.
  • Change hearts first. When hearts are changed, systems transform.
  • Focus on issues, not political alignment.
  • I must understand before I evaluate. This takes time. I hesitate to jump on someone's political bandwagon. Because, I don't yet understand the issues. 
  • Attack arguments, not people (no ad hominem abusiveness please). Evaluate arguments; formulate arguments. Love people.
  • Read contrary viewpoints, as much as you can.
  • Lift up Jesus, the one who changes hearts and minds, and from whom we Christians acquire our ethics.
  • When the Holy Spirit identifies a socio-cultural need and burdens you with it, labor in the Spirit to achieve transformation. For example, my church family helped begin a soup kitchen that provides a meal every day of the year, serving 75-150 a night. For example, my church family has been involved in serving and raising support for ministries that rescue women out of sex trafficking. For example, Linda and I have, over the decades, provided free counseling for needy marriages and families (this is ongoing, to the very moment I am typing these words).
  • Study and grow in learning about the relationship between following Jesus and political involvement. This will assist you in transcending shallow, uninformed, hate-filled debating. Here are some resources that have taken me deeper.




STUDYING and LEARNING - SOME RESOURCES THAT HAVE HELPED ME (These are resources I have read and studied, and have helped me better understand the relationship between religion and politics. Surely there are more. What books have helped you?)




And, of course, keep saturating yourself in Scripture.

Study the ethics of Jesus. Read the Gospels. Check this out - The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics. 

Do I agree with everything written in these books? 

Of course not. I don't even agree with everything you say.