Apostle David Johndrow - Fire And Grace

For years we have pounded the question into the hearts and minds of both Christians and pagans: WWJD? What would Jesus do? I'll tell you what he'd do, he'd do W hat T he F athers is D oing. (John 5;19) For even longer we've been told Jesus is our model. The truth is he didn't have a model, he had a relationship.He was not acting like someone else that he didn't know, he was carrying out instructions from his Father in heaven: the Creator of the earth. I don't know about you, but  am tired of hearing what Jesus would do. Jesus would feed the poor, he would be nice to gays, he would judge the US for being sinful and the list goes on. Whatever it is we feel motivated to accomplish in the name of Jesus, we want to ascribe a specific behavior to him that promotes our personal agenda. Some think he was a wimpy soft spoken nerd that only saves iPhone users. Others think that he is the thundering God who's voice shatters the cedars of Lebanon and whatever folk...

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...

Last time we talked about love, maturity and hearing the Holy Spirit. I have a couple more thoughts. Participation: It is interesting that much of the church have become spectators on Sunday mornings. It's too bad, because it opposes Paul's command to participate: 1 Corinthians 14:26 What then shall we say, brothers and sisters? When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. Everything must be done so that the church may be built up. Have you been to a service where you can get up front and and speak what God has put on your heart? I find it really exciting that God wants us to participate. Some churches have small-groups where you can participate in such a manner, but not many. How do you join in from the pew? First talk to the pastor. This type of service is hard to control - and most would rather go without it. Some, do work towards releasing folks like you bring something from God. Relationsh...

I decided that I am going to write a series on what the average Christian can do to make church better, and more godly. The is the intro, and I don't know how many posts it will take, but I am not worried about it. I do know that if we love others with our gifts, the job will get done. Working backwards from the goal, we can maybe see what steps we can take to turn the church around. So here are the first few thoughts. - Love: We need to better understand love, we often identify it with some mushy feeling that we felt while watching a romantic comedy. Think about it, how much love do you think Jesus felt the day he was crucified? If he always loved, and he does, do you think he was having mushy feelings for the Romans? Was he all choked up over the kindness they were showing him? - Holy Spirit: If we can't sense God's presence, or hear his voice, how would we ever know what to do? There are more than 31,000 verses in the Bible. Let say only a third of them are act...