Timothy's Thoughts

R ecently, I’ve been thinking about three words, blessing , praise , and worship . In those three words we have two pairs. We often use blessing and praise in a similar way. The Bible tells us to praise God and it also tells us to bless God. And we often talk about praise and worship. But as we consider these words, I think few people use blessing and worship correctly while praise isn’t used enough. The reason I say that is that I believe many churches are doing a lot of praise while forgetting about blessing and worship. Praise is an easy word to understand. When a child does something good, we praise him for it. We never praise a child for something that he will do in the future. The same is true when we talk about praising God. We don’t praise God for the things he is going to do, but when we talk or sing about the great things he has done for us, that is praise. The song says, “Praise him! Praise him, Jesus our blessed redeemer. For our sins he suffered and bled and died.”...

P aul wrote to Timothy in order to give him special instruction on how people in the church should behave themselves. In I Timothy 1:3, 4 that the church at Ephesus had problems with false doctrine as well as problems with people spending too much time talking about fables and endless genealogies. So, Paul tells Timothy what they should be doing instead. What does he tell him is the most important thing people should do when the church assembles? Pray. ( I Timothy 2:1-4 ) These days, we hear a lot about styles of worship, how many services we should have or whether we should have small group meetings during the week or on Sunday morning. In all of that, we may have lost sight of this simple truth. The most important thing for a church to do when it comes together for worship is to pray. We are to pray for our needs. We are to intercede for others. We are to give thanks to God. We are to pray. We are to pray for all men. We are to pray for those in authority. Why? So, that we may have...

Which Jesus do you follow? Have you ever stopped and wondered if the Jesus you worship is the same Jesus that died for your sins? It is interesting to listen to people talk about Jesus. I don’t believe Jesus would allow anyone to go to hell, one person might say. I don’t believe Jesus causes us to suffer, he just allows us to suffer, another might say. It isn’t that big of a deal if we get a divorce, Jesus just wants us to be happy , may be someone’s statement. People make many statements about Jesus. It is popular right now to think of Jesus as a buddy who wants our worship and gets it by standing by ready to pat us on the back and say, “I know you messed up again, but that’s alright.” Maybe we will find him out in the woods cooking pancakes. But is that the same Jesus who died on the cross? What we know about Jesus is what is in the Bible. We can’t just make up a new Jesus because we don’t like the Jesus in the Bible all that much. If we do, all we have done is give someone else th...