Jeremy’s Guide to a Better Blog
Jeremy from Till He Comes wrote a guest blog for ProBlogger about how to create a better blog. His basic tip for bloggers was this: If you want to blog better, you need to read more blogs.
But Jeremy breaks down the art of reading blogs into five helpful ways that reading more blogs will help your blog. You can check them out specifically at his post, but his basic points are these:
1. Read your own blog.
2. Read your readers’ blogs
3. Comment on other peoples’ blogs
4. Repost excerpts from the blogs of others
5. Repost the comments of others.
Some of the tips I follow, some I don’t. I actually read incorrectly “Read your reader’s blogs” and thought Jeremy meant we should read the blogs our readers read. He actually meant read the blogs your readers write. But this got me thinking two things: “How many of my readers blog?” & “What other blogs are my readers reading?”
So today is your day. If you blog, jump to the comment section, tell us about your blog and a little about what you write about. Or, jump to the comment section and tell all the rest of us what blogs you read, even if it’s just your favorite blog. Maybe we can all learn a little bit from each other.
On Sonship (Part VI)
The last few weeks we’ve been discussing the implications of sonship on our walk with Christ. If you’re interested, you can check out the previous posts in the series here:
On Sonship (Part I)
On Sonship (Part II)
On Sonship (Part III)
On Sonship (Part IV)
On Sonship (Part V)
God gives us spiritual parents.
One of the things that I love about God is how incredibly practical He is. Even though He is willing to give us Himself as a father, he knows that we were designed to live in relationship with other beings with skin. God stoops down to our level, changes us with His fathering heart, and even goes one step farther: He sends spiritual parents in our lives.
A spiritual parent is a human being who knows Christ as their Lord and is tasked with bringing you as an individual into your full sonship in God. Paul said to the Corinthians that though they had many teachers in Christ, they had one father—himself (1 Corinthians 4:15). He had become a father to the whole Corinthian church through being the first to bring the Gospel to Corinth. Paul had a special relationship because of that act that always gave him permission to speak into their messy situations. In an ideal setting, the person who led you to Jesus should be one of your primary spiritual parents. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
When a person comes to Christ, if the person that lead them to Jesus is either absent or non-existent (meaning the person came to know Jesus by simply reading the Bible, finding a tract, etc.) then a spiritual adoption must occur. When this happens, spiritually mature, well-fathered believers can and should reach out to new believers and assume the fathering role in their Christian walk. While this is not the best scenario for spiritual parenting, it will work in a pinch.
The goal of these spiritual parents is to raise these spiritual sons and daughters into their new Kingdom identity. The spiritual parent is tasked with loving with the Father’s love and being a physical representative of the Heavenly Father in the new believer’s life. Spiritual parents also will become channels of wisdom passed down from other believers (2 Timothy 2:1-2). They will also bring discipline and correction to those areas that are in need of it. Most who think they are spiritual parents believe it is done primarily through teaching. In reality, sonship is taught through life lived together, love shared, and wisdom passed on in life as situations arise. Spiritual parents are constantly “re-presenting” God as Father, so that the lies we naturally believe about God are dispelled.
It’s through this process of mirroring God the Father, teaching new sons how to experience sonship, and being a tangible fathering force that these spiritual parents reproduce spiritual sons. In the end the sons and daughters they raise will raise spiritual children of their own, because they’ve been well fathered. This process, continued for many generations of disciples, would pass on and expand the circle of family and sonship that God designed to rest on all of humanity.
God raises sons and daughters through natural parents, Himself, and spiritual parents. And now that we understand how God raises His children, we have to turn our attention to combatting the orphan mentality in us and in others. We’ll begin looking at that next week….
Photo Credit: Hug by popofatticus
The Wayback Machine: February
Some things just get better with age. “The Wayback Machine” posts occur at the end of every month and reference the best posts of that month in years past. My hope is to provide a good jumping on point for readers who have never been to Pursuing Glory.
2009
Back in 2009, my good friend Dick Speight rolled out the first of many books that the Lord has put in him. He offered me the great joy of writing a foreword for the book. So when the book hit the shelves in February, I gave a little background on Dick and shared my recommendation for the book. It’s still a great book that will help many draw away and experience Jesus’ love. I encourage you not just to read the post but to think about picking up a copy.
2007
The House Church We’ve All Been Waiting For
This post was more of a report about what was going on in our house church during its very early stages. You can tell we’ve definitely progressed beyond some of the issues listed here, but the point is that we were actually meeting God like we intended to. Check this post out for a glimpse into the good and the bad of what we were early on.
This post was a short attempt to sum up where I was feeling the Lord take us three weeks in to our house church. Four years later, much has changed but so much is still the same. It’s clear looking back, I wasn’t just trying to start a house church, I was hoping for true apostolic Christianity to emerge. We’re still contending for that to this day.
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 