Apostle David Johndrow - Fire And Grace

Disappointment is a common emotion. And every Christian I have ever met has been disappointed. I am sure that Jesus was disappointed at times - He did have emotions. For the record, the word disappointment is not found in the Bible. There were, however; many disappointing circumstances in the lives of Bible characters. Think: Joseph, Jonah and Peter. I think that as Christians we see faith as the ability to just know something will happen: place coin in machine, turn key, out comes candy. I suppose sometimes God works like that with us. We have a thought, desire, need, or want, and we ask God for it - like parking spaces or arriving at the scene of an accident. I call these the "Oh my God!" prayers. The process is a bit like a spiritual scratch ticket. I have found that my faith works like a muscle - a puny one most of the time. Some days I have a walk in the park, and other days it is a marathon for which I often feel unprepared. When we contrast faith and disappointmen...

I guess after a half century of war, and natural disasters during my lifetime, I don't get too freaked out about these things. I am not without compassion, I fact I think the worst feeling I can think of was those on the that last plane (Flight 93) on 9/11 - they knew what was going on. How awful it must have been. It is interesting to me that those that don't believe in God try to find other reasons for all this catastrophe. For those of faith, some blame God, others call it sovereign. I suppose if I was an atheist, I suppose I wouldn't be able to sign an insurance policy that doesn't cover  acts of God - there would be no such thing. As a Christian there are some real stress-relievers beyond even the wonderful and supernatural peace of God. There are many comforting Bible verses. I like ones such as these: "you are graven on my palm" (Isaiah 49:16), "Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds" (James 1...

... you'd be here reading a Fire & Grace blog today? What did you think that you would be doing today, 10 years ago, 20 or even 30 if you were alive? I had all sorts of dreams. I wanted to be a professorial athlete in a couple of sports. My favorites were hockey, motocross and downhill skiing. When I was in high-school I thought of becoming and airline pilot and going to college. Once I had my first taste of entrepreneurship, I wanted to be a successful DOT COM business and make millions. The problem with all of those dreams? My own limitations; that's what. I finally discovered that I wasn't smart enough for an Ivy League college (not to mention I didn't have the grades - I mean 222 out of 224 is pretty pathetic). In hockey I lost almost as many teeth as I gave up goals, and two times I had the pole position in motorcycle racing and lost it. I've been writing this blog for nearly 5 years, and well, writing is not going to make me a success. T...

Stereotypes are bad, but have you ever thought why we have them? It's because they are true to some degree. Most people claim that they want to be individuals, but they often end up identifying with a larger group. Christians certainly can be like that. That's what makes light-bulb jokes about denominations sort of funny. HERE are some if you'd haven't heard how many evangelicals it takes to change one. I like Jeff Foxworthy's  "you might be a redneck if" routines. In the very same style of humor, I have created my own one-liners about religious people. There is no conclusive or factual way to tell if someone is religious - but some of the following things sure do make you think. You might be religious if you think that _______ . . . . the church is a building. . . . the King James is the only authoritative Bible translation. . . . all Catholics are not saved. . . . tongues are the only evidence of salvation. . . . 4 Spiritual Laws, Roma...

Thank God for Heaven! I have recently lost four people that were part of my life at various times. I wrote about my friend  Curtis in February. I  wrote about the man that was like a Father to me me at one time - he's gone too. Wednesday I went to lookup a pastor from Romania that was close to me during my divorce over 10 years ago. We had thousands of emails over the years - I found his obituary.  And a fellow high school teammate also passed away. (I haven't even finished this post, and today another high school classmate lost the battle with cancer today, Thursday.) For some odd reason, my Yahoo account which I have had since they day they came online in 1998 or 1999 has started sending random emails from January of 2000; probably because I have 25,000 emails in my inbox. They made me think that I had not heard from a couple of folks in a long time. Through the wonder of the Internet we've kept up for years. ...

I am not really going to write about cheesecake, it simply sounded good as the idea popped into my head... I just read a really sad blog. It was about a  Christian who converted to atheism . I guess what's so sad is that I am so passionate about Jesus, and no matter how hard I tried to shake off the love of God, I couldn't lose it. There just wasn't enough alcohol and drugs to quench the fire burning on the altar of my soul. Many times I would lay there in bed I could feel the presence of the Holy Spirit, yet I didn't really want anything to do with church or religion. Recently I have read a lot about the bottom line for salvation, what exactly do we need to do to get saved, get into Heaven, and into the presence of God. That is one good thing about the Rob Bell controversy; we get to question stuff like this, and use the word heretic. The latter being rather foolish. The rest of the time it seems I read theories about Jesus, about Christian...

Today I am taking a break from my religious rhetoric and sarcastic spirituality. I did however; write a blog for the Kingdom Bloggers that you might enjoy. Like Job, there are lots of calamities that God can allow the adversary of our souls to inflict upon us. After all Satan went to God to ask if he could attack Job and try his faith. The only skills on his resume, are theft, murder and destruction. . . READ MORE

It is really interesting, all over the Internet this week, people were asking questions about the Kingdom. And as a result, there was plenty of blogarrhea. How do you feel about having fun as a Christian? About Rob Bell? About Calvinism? About salvation? There are a lot of opinions out there. I once heard Wayne Anderson say this: "Does God have an opinion?" And all across the sanctuary there were nodding heads. "Yes." "Then why do you need one?" And all across the sanctuary there was hushed silence and a couple of nervous laughs. If you think about it, God doesn't need us. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit could have thier own gong show without us. As I listen to all these blo-pinions  (blog opinions), I have to make some sort of determination as to: A) where the writer is coming from, B) what their agenda might be, and c) what are they not saying that I need to know. If we follow Mr. Anderson's lead here, we actually don't need to know all t...

Two years ago I had a wonderful revelation. Church is never going to happen if you and I don't get involved. And it requires the Spirit of God. I know, you already knew that. Today I was reminded of that again. If you have been following this blog for any length of time, there are some common themes - even if you are a farily recent reader, you know I just finished teaching the 5-Fold School of Ministry. Did you know the church cannot function without vision? Nope, and most of us either embrace the pastor's personal vision, or we find ourselves rejected and left out. Certainly it is good for those that embrace it and tough on those that don't. The Bible says that the people perish for lack of vision. (Proverbs 29:18) So, we've got to have vision. The problem is that a pastoral vision is incomplete. Ouch! I know, but let me explain. Every vision is subject to the Biblical principals. The president of the United States may have vision for something, however; he is s...

On Friday, to my surprise, my questionnaire on conversion was featured on Oh Me of Little Faith , a blog written by Jason Boyett. His focus was on folks that switch religions, or make substantial changes within Christianity. One of his blogs was about a senior pastor that dropped out of church altogether. Another was from a Southern Baptist that converted to Mormonism. Those are some dramatic changes. What I found interesting were the reasons that each one gave for dumping their church. Below is an except, and HERE is a link to the full blog. Be sure to leave a comment for Jason! Congregational Church to Charismatic Episcopalian Please describe the conversion experience or process: I had received Christ a few years earlier. It was genuine, and real. Truthfully, I didn't really know what to do with my conversion. I was glad I had it, and I was growing in the word, but it was more like spiritual jewelry. There I sat across from Father Folsom at hi...

More on fixing the church from your pew ... My apologies to Charlie and Tony for the misfire on this post. You got comments on it before I even finished it! Personal Touch is Not Enough: I often think about how long I sat in churches and hoped that I would better engage people. I am not all that outgoing according to Myers-Briggs. I would, however; prefer that my whole life came to me on a silver platter. That said, one of the main problems in church is that we don't get to actually know people in the larger ones, though I have had the same issue with small-groups too. I even belonged to a men's group where we did all the right stuff - in fact it was a closed group and no new folks were allowed to attend. The result, we still didn't get to know each other, but we did get to know a lot about each other. Yesterday in church, the pastor had us break into groups of four. We were each given one minute to tell the other three something significant about ourselves. It w...

More on fixing the church from your pew ... I often wonder how large portions of the New Testament are ignored in terms of things like what is  permissible in a service ? The most important item that we can bring to church besides our backside, is faith. In order to fix church when we are not leaders, we need faith. I guess a good question is this: what in fact builds our faith? There are a couple of elements to building faith, and I will talk about those. -1 Hearing the Word of God:  If the church is broken, it is because we don't know how to have faith in God's word, or we do not know how to hear God. I am not certain that they are one in the same, but for our part in getting the church to turn the corner, we need to hear God, either from His word, or from some other revelatory source. Romans 10:17So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. -2 Witnessing the Power of God: You know, G...