Tim Miller > Recent Status Updates

Family is loving it so far!

Jason Helopoulos is becoming a new favorite. He is absolutely spot on when it comes to corporate worship and children in worship!

Corporate worship is
1. Biblical—Filled with and derived from Scripture

2. Reverent—Meeting with God is anything but casual; casual worship of the living, true, holy, sovereign God of the universe just doesn't exist!

3. Joyful—Understanding what we were and what God is Eph 2:4-7

4. Edifying—Our worship services serve God AND one another

5. Doxological—Praise and adoration flow as we commune with God

Lou focusing this chapter on 25 ways that parents provoke their children to anger... humbling reminder that parenting so frequently requires self-examination and taking the log out of our own eye first.

The objective should not be Church growth, but church health, because growth must proceed from health.

We should focus on the health of the church and let God take care of the growth. If you do it the other way around, you may end up with an unhealthy church that has a lot of people— One that may look successful, statistically, but is not really pleasing to God or delivering transformed disciples serving Christ.

Johnson rightly criticizes the Market Driven / Seeker Sensitive / Culturally Contemporary approach to church. Today, online media is able to cater to extreme niche content, the church follows along, creating microculture churches, e.g. Cowboy Church with dirt floor. Often contemporary means for the young at the exclusion of the elders. We have lost the catholicity of the church, allowing secular culture to direct us.

"To improve property was to put it to good use as opposed to allowing it to lie idle. Improving baptism is simply ensuring that one's baptism is not merely external, not merely formal, and not merely symbolic." Excellent section that covers the catechizing, discipling, praying, and training that goes on by parents, elders, and the church in the process of improving ones baptism from infancy well into old age.

"The fenced table, excluding the unrepentant, was like a divine cannon-shot over the bow, warning, one to get right with God." Among the many things the Lord's Table represents for us believers, it's also a good reminder, it is also a tool of Gospel Evangelism to the unsaved...For baptized non-communing members, it is also, "a reminder that, though a covenant child, one had unfinished business with God."

On Hymnody: A church using a trad. hymnal, honors Scripture, respects the past, esteems tradition, and affirms the church's catholicity: hymns from Late Antiquity, Middle Ages, Reformation and Puritan Eras, 18th Century Evangelicals, and 19th/20th century. Replacing the hymnal with contemporary genre/style will result in a generation ignorant of its rich history and continue the slow death of congregational singing.

Sec. 1 Bible Filled is convicting. The Word should permeate our worship service: Congregational readings of Scripture, Psalm Singing, Prayers full of Scripture, and Preaching as exposition from Scripture and covering whole books of the Bible. This is how we address the widespread biblical and theological ignorance in the churches: Read, Preach, Pray, and Sing the Word as practiced the last 450+ yrs since Reformation.

Acts 15: 1.A dispute over circumcision with certain false teachers who came down from Judea. 2.This dispute was not settled in the church of Antioch where it originated. 3. Matter was referred to an external ecclesiastical assembly consisting of the apostles and elders at Jerusalem. 4. This assembly met publicly to deliberate. 5. They pronounced a decision. 6. To this the churches of Antioch Syria and Cilicia yielded