Thoughts of a Christian Husband, Father, and Pastor
By God’s grace, I’ve been called by the elders of Grace Fellowship Church to lead a church planting effort on the east side of Toronto. I just posted this update on the church website, so I thought I’d post it here as well. Needless to say, I’m super-excited to see what God will do to [...]
What makes a pastor competent? What is it that equips him for his task in ministry? A quick look at the job postings from a lot of churches across North America list all kinds of requirements. Good with time management Young Humorous Outgoing Gifted & dynamic speaker Good with young people A seminary degree And [...]
I took the morning off today. I took my girls for a long, long walk in their stroller, then we went to the park and played with the swings and the slide, ran around like crazy people, and played in the sand. As we were playing, I was filled with joy and delight in all [...]
Last Autumn at GFC we embarked on a journey. We endeavoured to ask and answer 26 of the most crucial questions that Christians should be asking–and should know the answers to. Basically, it was a sneaky (read: not boring) way to teach our people sytematic theology. We taught this series on Sunday evenings, with various [...]
Here are a few links you might be interested in if you’re a Christian in or around Toronto or the GTA. John Bell writes on evangelism in the gay village here in Toronto Paul McDonald begins a blog of his summer as an evangelist in the city Good things are happening in Toronto!
If you’re in any sort of ministry in the church, I would recommend that you go and download the messages from the Basics Conference. In particular, Piper’s messages, Begg’s first message (he hasn’t preached the second one yet), and Tim Challies’ breakout session are worth your time. If I tried to write out all the [...]
Yesterday we were tremendously blessed as a church family to go and be a part of the first ever baptism service of Grace Chapel, in Markham. Pastor Habib Sakr preached the word, several gave testimonies to God’s saving grace in their lives, and twenty-four were baptized! Amazing! Below are the videos I took of the [...]
Wednesday night at GFC we had our monthly meeting for the men and the women. Usually our Wednesday night meetings are times for the whole family, with our kids program in full swing. On the first Wednesday of every month, however, we have a meeting where we aim to build relationships between the men and [...]
Things have been really busy at GFC lately… but busy with all the best things! We’re church planting, running a ministry for local pastors, preparing for a conference we’re putting on, in addition to doing all the normal day-to-day things of an active, healthy church. Our Lord has blessed us abundantly with things to do, [...]
Kids love Christmas… and kids love Christmas presents. Just about the only thing that’s better than getting a great Christmas gift is getting a Christmas gift that’s better than any of the gifts your siblings or friends got. Nothing ruins a good gift quicker than realizing that someone else got a better gift. Kids and earthly-minded [...]
Recently for my homiletics class, I was given the assignment of interviewing my favourite pastor/preacher on the topic of sermon preparation and preaching. I’ll post some of the excerpts here. If it should strike you as interesting (and if you’re a preacher, it should!), then you can download the whole interview transcript here. Let me [...]
This, of course, is following up on yeterday’s post, and continues where it left off. Delight Drives Obedience The heart which is converted is a heart that God has changed, so that is enabled to see that supreme delight is found only in God. This is why Jesus could say in John 14.15, ‘If you [...]
Over the next couple of days, I’m hoping to toss out some snippets of thoughts that I’ve been reflecting on lately. I’d been hoping to develop each of them more, but time has not allowed. If any of them seem interesting to you, you can develop them on your own a little more. Our pastor [...]
I must confess: when Paul first asked me if I’d be willing to preach on one of GFC’s core values, I got excited. But when I found out the value he had in mind was freedom, my excitement was dampened. The notion of freedom isn’t something that has historically ‘fired me up.’ When I thought [...]
There are at least two things keeping me busy–but also keeping me quite excited right now. The first is preparing to preach for this Sunday at GFC. We’re going through a series on our 5 Core Values right now. The first two message have been on (1) Truth, and (2) Humility. If the Lord is [...]
In the Lord’s providence, we finished up our morning series in James and our evening series in Galatians on this past Sunday. It was quite interesting to me that both sermons finished with exhortations to Christians to be confronting sin in the lives of their brothers and sisters. As I sat and listened to my [...]
The other night as we were standing in church, singing at the beginning of our prayer meeting, I was overwhelmed by God’s grace. The songs that Joshua and our ‘Band of Brothers’ choose to lead us in worship are always theologically-rich and packed with scriptural truth, so the fact that I would be overwhelmed by [...]
It’s a funny thing to me how lessons seem to weave themselves into our lives at seemingly ‘random’ points in time (which, of course, shows me that they’re not random at all). Over the past eight weeks or so, as I’ve been preaching through James, I’ve been amazed at how clearly he contradicts our contemporary [...]
These are some notes taken from the sermon I preached this past Sunday at GFC. I was preaching from James 4:13-17 and the necessity of realizing our absolute dependence on God before we do any planning–even mundane, day-to-day planning. You can listen to the whole sermon here to get the context for the notes that [...]
As I lamented yesterday, preaching through James 4.1-12 quickly made me a little sad because I wasn’t able to pursue some rabbit trails that I would’ve loved to go down. One of those was how this passage should instruct us guys in our husbandry. In verse four, the people of God are referred to as [...]
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