from April 18, 2010 prayer email

Grace Community Church is a small non-denominational church in NW Austin, located a couple of miles from where we live. GCC has a significant, decades long commitment to a traditional involvement (prayer and financial partnership) in missions. Today I had the opportunity to preach in their Sunday morning worship service on “two defining questions”.



Question one: “who is God?” My response: “our God is a missionary (sending) God”.

Question two: “who am I?” My response: “I am sent in the same way as Christ”, based on John 20:21.

My primary challenge to the congregation was to live missionally where they live, work, and play, recognizing that God has called most of us to reach the lost in our natural spheres of influence.

We briefly considered a top 10 list for missional living:
1. proximity
2. priority of the least reached
3. presence
4. partnership
5. practice missionary methodology
6. prayer
7. practical service
8. practice hospitality
9. probing questions
10. proclamation

How about you, do you see yourself as sent in the same way as Christ? Are you demonstrating and proclaiming the gospel well where you live, work, and play?

from April 4, 2010 prayer email

Although Christmas has a much higher profile in American culture, Good Friday / Easter is the Christian holiday that best represents the essential core of the Christian message. “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures …” (I Corinthians 15:3-4).

Good Friday is all about forgiveness and restoration of a broken relationship with a deeply offended God through Christ’s death in our place. Easter is all about new life, spiritual power, and future hope through the resurrection of Jesus from the grave.



It has been more than 37 years since Christ radically changed my life as a freshman in college. I am so grateful. Who knows what my life would look like today apart from His presence and transforming touch.

Each of us who has placed our faith in Jesus has experienced the reality of Good Friday and Easter in our lives. All of our sins (past, present, and future) have been nailed to the cross. We are forgiven, declared not guilty. We are no longer enemies of God, but beloved sons and daughters. We have been made new creatures in Jesus Christ. We have living permanently within us the powerful Holy Spirit, who enables us to live a life that pleases God and that advances His Kingdom. And we have a future hope beyond our wildest imaginations awaiting us when we move from this life to the next.

With all of this why are we continually tempted to go back to a system of living built around self reliance and performance measures. “Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?” (Galatians 3:3). Let us this Easter be reminded once again of the need to live a dependent and supernatural life. A life dependent solely on the once-for-all substitutionary work of Jesus Christ and made supernatural by the moment-by-moment empowerment of the Spirit of God.