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Andy Stanley: The Church Can Be Deep and Wide

Deep & Wide by Andy Stanley

A little over a year ago, Angie and I started planting Grace Hills Church in northwest Arkansas, and one of our biggest hopes is that it's a church that unchurched people love to attend. So Andy Stanley's newest book, Deep & Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend caught my attention. I …

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Doing Discipleship Post-Resurrection Style

Sermon on the Mount

I've heard plenty of talk about discipleship and multiplication recently, and it usually goes something like this... If you want to make disciples the way Jesus wants, you have to do it the way Jesus did it. And Jesus, in His earthly ministry, chose only a few people, weeded out those who weren't true …

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Sacrifice Everything For Buried Treasure

Screen Shot 2012-03-07 at 10.42.45 AM

Last night, I spent some time with the Association of Baptist Students at The Hedge, their Tuesday night gathering. I talked about going "all in for the kingdom" and shared from the parables Jesus told about the value of discovering the rule and reign of Christ over all things. The Kingdom of Heaven is like …

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Ordering the Priorities of Life

Priorities

Priorities are a continuing struggle for most of us. For people in ministry leadership, this struggle usually doesn't result from a lack of commitment, but from a lack of clarity about our commitments. That is, we're either over-committed or we're committed to mutually exclusive priorities. We are all given 168 …

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Costly Grace: One of My New Favorite Books on Discipleship

Costly Grace

I have well over 1,000 books in my library, but just a handful come to mind when I think of books that are able to define discipleship well. They would include Jim Berg's Changed Into His Image, Clyde Cranford's Because We Love Him, and of course, Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life. Now, I'm adding another …

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Always Be Investing In Someone

Bread

Call it discipleship. Call it mentoring. Call it whatever you want, but one of our kingdom assignments is to gather people around us and invest in them. Jesus did it with the twelve, and even more with the inner circle of three. Paul did it with Barnabas, then Silas, then Timothy. Barnabas did it with Paul, …

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How God Prepares a Heart for Greatness

Samuel - Thinking

Samuel (our son) is now six days old as I write this, and we are already talking about what we're going to do to prepare him for adulthood. That's the goal - doing all we can as parents to help him grow up into a well-adjusted, independent, godly young man. We're already putting aside money in his college …

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Let’s Kill Lazarus, Too

Raising Lazarus

I've always been fascinated with the last week of Jesus' life. About one third of the gospel record is devoted to this very short period of time, so the details matter a great deal. We know that the Jewish leaders wanted Jesus dead, but did you ever notice that they wanted Lazarus dead too? About a week …

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Jesus’ Finest Hour

If you were given one week to live and you knew the end of your life was just days away, what would you do? How would you spend that time? Jesus did know that his hour was coming. He knew His time was nearing. How did He spend His time? Too much material is devoted to His final week to detail it all here, but …

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Audio of Men’s Bible Study on Discipleship

I recently posted some thoughts about what discipleship looks like and that article was really the product of a recent men's Bible study at Bethel. Every Tuesday a bunch of men get up and get to church by 6:15 a.m. for a pre-workday Bible study. We opened the year with an open discussion about the meaning of …

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