Pastor Prince

What role did Jesus want his followers to play in the world?  Matthew 5:13-16 says he wanted them to be penetrating and transforming agents for God's kingdom. In this passage, he said they were the "salt of the earth" and the "light of the world."  In Jesus' time, salt was a penetrating and purifying agent.  It penetrated food and killed the corruption in it.  That's why in the days before refrigerators people salted meats and other foods.  Light was a penetrating and revealing agent.  It penetrated the darkness and revealed what was in it.  It showed what was true. This passage appears in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7).  In this section, Jesus described the ideal attitudes and behaviors of kingdom citizens.  When you read through it, you'll find that kingdom citizens were to have unique lifestyles that went against the grain of our broken world.  As they went into the world and lived by the distinct values of the kingdom,

After an arduous 15-month-long journey, Meriwether Lewis arrived at the headwaters of the Missouri River.  As he took a drink from the cool spring there, he thought he would climb to the top of a nearby hill and see a slope that gently descended to the Columbia River.  He thought he and his men would carry their canoes on their backs down the slope for less than a day and reach the river.  Then they would ride that river downstream to the Pacific. But when Lewis climbed that hill, he couldn't believe his eyes.  Instead of seeing the gentle slope descending to the Columbia, he saw. . .the Rocky Mountains!   In this book Canoeing the Mountains , Tod Bolsinger compares the challenge of Lewis and Clark at the Lemhi Pass to that the of church in America today.  We've gone off our map.  The landscape we're in is totally different from what we've known.  Our "canoes," our past paradigms and programs, worked great in the past.  But they don't work in

In early 20th century America, modern science brought great advances to farming.  State universities developed agricultural schools, which trained farmers-to-be in their craft and developed new farming methods.   These schools had test facilities for farming that experimented with seeds, soil, and much more.  They often developed demonstration plots.  These demonstration plots showed what was possible, what could be.  They showed farmers new possibilities for improving their farms and income. Jesus' teachings suggest that he intended his church to be a demonstration plot for his kingdom.  In his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7, we see the kinds of attitudes and actions kingdom citizens were to have.  His followers were to live in this world according to the values of the kingdom to come.  They were to be distinctive, showing what could be and would be when his kingdom came fully.   The most distinctive value of this demonstration plot was love.  John 13:34-35 re

Jesus' dream for his church was that it would penetrate and transform the world like salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16), assaulting the very gates of death (Matthew 16:18).   After his death, resurrection, and ascension, and the coming of the Holy Spirit, it did all these things!  It did it through the power of the Holy Spirit.  Church members received spiritual gifts, by which they equipped each other to be the body of Christ, continuing his work in the world (1 Corinthians 12:1-11; Rom. 12:3-8; Eph. 4:11-13).   Sadly, the church got off track.  In a way, it was a victim of its own success.  It became settled and institutional.  The practices of the baptism and the Lord's Supper became sacraments that required special handling.  Those special handlers became the clergy.  They became the ministers of the church.  Most people became the laity.  They became the supporters and consumers of the work of the clergy.   That arrangement worked well as along as Christiani