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We’re Putting Together a New and Different Kind of Christian Creator Network!
We’ve been thinking and talking about this for months now, but it seems to be time to start making this idea become a reality. If you’re tired of dead discords and pointless partnerships, give this a watch and then come chat about it with us. You can help us build the greatest Christian Creator…
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We’re Changing the Online World Right Now! (Join Us!)
“When I came across XtianNinja’s channel on Twitch, I recognized he had a goal that was more than simply streaming and playing games. As I continued watching his streams, I saw how happy he was (and is) to be a true friend and reach out to those who may be hurting, whether they’re comfortable…
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Why You Need “Big Brother”, Criticism vs Discernment, P.P 6.6: Community
In this week’s episode, I share an interesting idea about trusting big brother, an interesting article about the difference between discernment and criticism, and continue our interesting study of Pilgrim’s Progress by exploring the end of the sixth chapter where Christian tours the Beautiful Castle. Podcast Link:https://anchor.fm/xtianninja/episodes/Why-You-Need-Big-Brother–Criticism-vs-Discernment–P-P-6-6-Community-e14u6k8/a-a6704h3 Interesting Links:– Subscribe to the Podcast: https://anchor.fm/xtianninja–…
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Why You Should Argue With Yourself, The Danger of “Fear of Man”, P.P. 6.5: Hard Questions
In this episode: Listening to that little voice inside you, how “Fear of Man” can wreck your life, and why you should let people ask you extremely personal questions. Podcast Link:https://anchor.fm/xtianninja/episodes/Why-You-Should-Argue-With-Yourself–The-Danger-of-Fear-of-Man–P-P–6-5-Hard-Questions-e14ju6e/a-a65hugm Interesting Links: – Article: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/from-gods-to-gallows– Pilgrim’s Progress Free Book: https://www.desiringgod.org/books/the-pilgrims-progress– Support XtianNinja OM: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=7XJFMCJKESBEG Unedited Script: Hello, today is Friday, July 16th, 2021 and welcome…
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How to Prepare for The Lord’s Supper
Audio: Text: Tonight we are going to be doing something a little special, something we haven’t done since I’ve been the pastor here, and that is to have an evening communion service. It’s interesting how this happened. Some people came to me and said that they felt like they wanted to “change up communion”.…
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Church Relationships Can Get Complicated
Audio: Text: Welcome to the 60th sermon in of our study of the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians! We started this series in April of 2016 and we’ve covered a lot of ground over the past couple years, but after long last, we’ve reached the final section where Paul is wrapping up…
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Why Our Church Has a Membership Covenant
Sermon Audio: Sermon Text: When we become Christians we enter into a new family called the Church of Jesus Christ. When we put our faith in Jesus, God takes us out from under the condemnation we find under His Law grants us forgiveness through Jesus, and then makes us a part of His Kingdom.…
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Truth In Love – Loving People in a Biblical Way
Podcast Audio: Our church’s mission statement says that we “share the love of Jesus” two ways: “….through Biblical Teaching and loving relationships.” The second part of that is easy to understand. We have a loving relationship with Jesus and that makes us prioritize having loving relationships with others. Agents of Truth But sometimes it doesn’t…
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The Importance of “We”
Podcast Audio: “I Need a New Seven-Hundred-and-Ten” A man walks into a car dealership. He’s not fond of being there, because he knows that some of these places are famous for ripping people off, so his plan is to not let on that he has no idea what he’s talking about. He gets into…
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Christian Integrity: Honouring The Faithful
Here’s the audio for the sermon: You may have noticed that I changed the title of this series. Instead of being “Being People of Integrity”, I’ve simply called it “Christian Integrity”, and that’s because I believe that it’s important to distinguish the fact that we are specifically talking about the characteristics of a person…
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Integrity: Reject the Vile – Dealing with Unrepentant Sin in the Church (Part 2)
Last week I presented a problem: What do we do with hypocritical people who call themselves Christians, but continue to love their sin? This week I want to look at a biblical solution. This is all part of a series on Psalm 15 which talks about what it looks like to be a person…
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Integrity: Rejecting the Vile – Dealing with Unrepentant Sin in the Church (Part 1)
What we are talking about in this series is how to be a person of Christian Integrity. To do that we are examining what Psalm 15 says about what it means to look like a Christian. I don’t mean how to be superficial in our faith, nor is this a list of ways to…
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Integrity: Loving Your Neighbour & How to End Discrimination
For the past couple weeks, and the next few, we are looking at what it means to look like a Christian. Saying that it is controversial because a lot of people don’t understand, or want to talk about, the fact that there are standards of practice for all Christians. “God Loves Me The Way…
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Eating With Sinners (Mark 2:13-17)
We’ve already talked about how Mark is introducing Jesus as the one answer to all the important questions in the world. If you recall, we said that the audience he is writing to are a group of persecuted, Roman Christians who aren’t looking for deep theology, long dissertations or genealogies, or a lot of…
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Serving Others: Spiritual Gifts – The Four Core Christian Disciplines
Hello again! As I said before, I haven’t been posting much over the summer for a variety of reasons. Thanks to everyone who has been praying for my family. Here’s a little post-summer update for those praying: We had a wonderful visit with my parents who came up from Alberta. We went everywhere and…
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Response to “Autistic Boy’s Family told to ‘Move or Euthanize Him’” – Why do People Get Sick?
I haven’t been posting for the past while because of a big move and some vacation time, but after coming across this piece of news on Facebook (also here), I felt I had to rush posting the sermon I preached this week. We’ve been going through the Gospel of Mark (I’ll post previous sermons soon)…
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Serving Others: General Areas of Service – The Four Core Christian Disciplines
We talked before about how every Christian is called to service, “Drinking the Cup” means accepting our divinely appointed destiny, acknowledging that we are “saved to serve” and that Christianity is NOT a commodity exchange. We serve sacrificially because of our connection to Jesus Christ the perfect model of a servant. What I want to…
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Growing at Church – Make Love Your Priority
(Click here for the video) I like learning and teaching theology. I have thoroughly enjoyed preaching this Foundations series because it has been full of deep, biblical, gospel truths – the very bedrock of what we should build our lives on. I love being able to help people know God better by answering questions…
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My Boys' Testimonies and Baptisms
On October 14th I had the amazing privilege of baptising my sons Ethan and Edison. It was such a wonderful day, and my wife and I are so proud of them. I’ve finally uploaded their testimony and baptism video to youtube and want to share it with you. The audio isn’t that great, so here’s a…
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Pretending To Be F.I.N.E.
How are you? – Fine. Really? – Yup, Fine. Are you sure, ’cause you don’t sound fine? – Totally fine. Ok. Have you had that conversation with someone? Someone once told me that F.I.N.E. stands for “Feelings I’m Not Expressing”, and while I agree that there are times and places to keep things to yourself…
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Gossip Defined
Gossip is… uh… Last night at small group study we had a surprising discovery. Everyone around the table was absolutely agreed that gossip is a bad thing, and that we should confront it, but when I asked the group to define gossip, we couldn’t do it. We danced around a lot of ideas like…
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Why I am Reformed
The above video spurred me to write this entry. It touched me deeply and reminded me of who God is creating me to be, where I have come from, and why I do what I do the way I do it. It is beautifully shot, and powerfully narrated by John Calvin. I encourage you…
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Unity – A Powerful Witness
Last Friday I had a post called “We All Need A Good Church” where I talked about the importance of being around other believers. I mentioned in the introduction that I was going to be sharing a sermon I preached on a related topic – unity in the church. Here’s the link: “Unity – A…
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Giving & Receiving Criticism
“You can please some of the people, some of the time”, they say. I would add, “and some of the people who aren’t pleased have no problems telling you why.” Criticism is something we all have to deal with, isn’t it? None of us are perfect, and yet it surprises people when someone makes…
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We All Need A Good Church
I just paused my sermon prep for a moment so I could post this to the blog. I’m currently writing a sermon on The Powerful Witness of Unity in the Church and remembered that I had written in a Facebook Post earlier in the week. The two didn’t really connect in my mind until…
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Own Your "Why?" – How to Make Wise Decisions
I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 31 2010 as a way to help the congregation process Halloween, but it grew into something much bigger. It became a sermon about how to make all kinds of decisions. I repeat it here in hopes it will encourage you to make wiser choices, release you from…
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Male Eldership
There’s some confusion among Christians regarding male Eldership and the role of women in the church. This is a concern to me because it can easily become a divisive topic if it’s not clearly communicated and carefully (and humbly) studied. I want everyone to understand what God says about the different roles of…
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Christian Conflict Management Tools
I have some friends that are in a difficult place, trying to help some people they know reconcile hurting relationships. I offered to give them some helpful articles and tools, and believe that they may be able to help others. Some Articles: 1. Conflict Provides Opportunities 2. Peace-breakers, Peace-fakers, and Peacemakers 3. Four Promises of Forgiveness 4. How…
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The Story of Robin
I spoke on Meditation this week, beginning with a story of a man named Robin. Do you see yourself in his story? Robin wakes up once again to the beeping of the alarm clock, and hits snooze one more to see if he can squeeze out nine more minutes of sleep from his…
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The Speed-Dial Principle
While writing this article I was reminded about this song by Casting Crowns called “Does Anybody Hear Her” which seems to hit the nail on the head. Do Churches Still Help? I had a conversation recently where we were discussing the place of “para-church ministries” within the realm of global and local missions and…
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The Complexity of Christianity
I was invited for an “Ask The Pastor” night last week and brought along this handout I’d been working on. I sat in front of the white board and asked myself “If I am going to help the people in this church grow as Christians, then what does a fully functional disciple of Jesus…
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De-Trivializing Our World
Did you know… … a cluster of bananas is called a hand and consists of 10 to 20 bananas, which are known as fingers. … C3P0 is the first character to speak in Star Wars. … the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust is aluminum. … there are 1189 chapters in the Bible:…
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Parental Wisdom in Country Songs
Part of getting to know someone is asking them what kind of music they like. That question seems to rank close to “What do you do?” and “Where are you from?” when we are looking to understand someone better. I have a hard time with that question! I listen to so many different…
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Flame Wars in The Church
Did you know you can use salt to put out a fire? In fact, if you have a kitchen grease fire (and don’t have a fire-extinguisher) you shouldn’t use water, but instead cover it with salt. Why bring this up? Because there are some people out there reading this who need to use their…
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Discernment
Discernment When my daughter Eowyn was very little, she took it upon herself to simplift the alphabet. She’s replaced all the C’s, G’s, and K’s with the letter D. It was cute, (and if it caught on, would have made spelling a lot easier) but it made her difficult to understand at times. “Daddy, dan…
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By Request: “A Good Church”
I recently spoke at the 165th anniversary celebration for Beckwith Baptist, a church in the Ottawa area. I got a lot of comments and requests for the text, so I thought I’d post it here this week. It’s based on Acts 2:42-47. — A Good Church If you ask the question, “What is a…
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To Those Who Are Consistently Late For Church
Ok, I’ll admit that this may come across a little rant-ish, but I want to give a message to those who are Consistently Late for Church. You may want to print this one and pass it around. (First obvious question: “Are you talking about a certain person/family?”, the answer is “No. This problem is quite…
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Coffee & Fellowship
Let’s continue our brainstorm by linking Coffee to Fellowship, which is admittedly, the easiest of the bunch. Coffee and Fellowship… Fellowship and Coffee… they go together like coffee and cream. Cream and sugar. Coffee and cookies. Chocolate and coffee. Coffee and cake. Cake and ice cream. Ice cream and chocolate sauce. Mmmm… coffee flavoured…
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Gossip Kills Fellowship
I am compelled to write my first “Fellowship Wednesday” post about what I believe is the most poisonous thing to a fellowship of believers — gossip. As pastor of a former church I spent time in the office meeting with people. One day a man came in for a chat. On the way out…