The personal site of Jonathan Hayashi
Biblical illiteracy within churches are rampant and is all over the place! Pastors are doing diligence in preparing and preaching sermons, but the real problem is people are not reading their Bible!
Am I intended to be the hero of my HEART and the hero of MY story? Is this life about believing in myself and following my own heart?
The Bible reminds believers to avoid worthless foolish empty chatter, but instead to be thoroughly equipped and qualified with careful study of scripture. (2 Tim. 2:16; 3:17).
Does God really listen to my prayers? Does he really hear me when I cry out to him?
Pornography is evil. It is wrong, it is deadly, it distorts human sexuality, it is an assault upon human dignity. The moral consequences not just the secular world but even in American Evangelicals is devastating. Whether or not we are willing to overlook something like these repeated challenges, and is a scandal.
Edwards has exercised influence through his voluminous writings, through a school of disciples known as the “New England Theologians”, and through the evangelical and neo-orthodoxy movements during the 19th and 20th century.
Can spiritual disciplines turn Christians into simply doing a checklist of rules? Or are these tasks weighing down Christians with unnecessary guilt?
The greatest pastor theologian in American Puritanism, stimulator of the religious revival known as the “Great Awakening,” Jonathan Edwards penned these words the year of 1722 a resolution that he devoted himself to the aim for godliness and the glory of God.
Gossip is one sin that seems to fall in the spiritual “No-Man’s Land” like the awkward uncle around that Thanksgiving table that nobody wants to talk to or deal with; a passivity that many tolerate that widespread and eats us up like a cancer. It seems impossible to deal with it so instead we just kind of shove it under the carpet and pretend the big elephant is not in the room.
In this fallen world even people in a very complex, postmodern world are desperately hungry to hear the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. We need to step it up. We need to toughen up and take this job seriously. We need to be ready to suffer for the gospel. We need to be motivated by this stewardship that we have been entrusted. We are to run this race well.
We must know the sheer glory and goodness of what our Father has given us in Jesus Christ. To know Jesus in truth and love is to find the one thing worth finding, the one lasting happiness, the purpose of life, true contentment. It is about the greatness of God, not the significance of man. God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote (ibid., p. 219), “Indeed, our chief defect as Christians is that we fail to realize Christ’s love to us.” He adds (p. 223), “How important it is that we should meditate upon this love and contemplate it! It is because we fail to do so that we tend to think at times that He has forgotten us, or that He has left us.”