Change your Feed for the New Blog

THIS BLOG HAS MOVED TO STEPHENMURRAY.CO.ZA

Yes I’ve been scarce with the blogging. Two main reasons: Too much work at the moment and secondly I’ve been preparing to move …daylight to a new and improved blog thanks to the help of my friend Aaron Marshall. Daylight has been pimped and you can now find it at stephenmurray.co.za so please adjust your links accordingly. Plus if you subscribe to this blog by RSS or email you’ll need to change your subscription. My new feed is now http://feeds2.feedburner.com/stephenmurraycoza and if you want to subscribe by email you can do so by following this link.

Unfortunately I’ve lost the last 10 or so comments on the blog this side, so if your comment was one of those that got lost then feel free to repost it on the new site. Now get over there and check it out…

Guidance and Sanity

Although I consider myself something of a moderate charismatic, or ‘charismatic with a seat-belt’ as Driscoll calls it, one of the things that freaks me out in a lot of charismatic circles is the wacky things that get done to ‘discern’ God’s will. It’s really not just a pet-peeve on my side, it actually comes more from seeing people badly damaged pastorally through terrible advice on this subject. Keeping this in mind I was extremely excited to discover that Kevin DeYoung’s new book will directly address this issue. His book is entitled “Just Do Something: How to Make a Decision Without Dreams, Visions, Fleeces, Open Doors, Random Bible Verses, Casting Lots, Liver Shivers, Writing in the Sky, etc.” -what a fantastic title.

Here’s the Amazon blurb:

Hyper-spiritual approaches to finding God’s will don’t work. It’s time to try something new: Give up.

Pastor and author Kevin DeYoung counsels Christians to settle down, make choices, and do the hard work of seeing those choices through. Too often, he writes, God’s people tinker around with churches, jobs, and relationships, worrying that they haven’t found God’s perfect will for their lives. Or—even worse—they do absolutely nothing, stuck in a frustrated state of paralyzed indecision, waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting for clear, direct, unmistakable direction.

But God doesn’t need to tell us what to do at each fork in the road. He’s already revealed his plan for our lives: to love him with our whole hearts, to obey His Word, and after that, to do what we like.

No need for hocus-pocus. No reason to be directionally challenged. Just do something.

Now here’s the fascinating and extremely encouraging part – get this: The forward is written by Joshua Harris, a well known charismatic leader. Not only that but DeYoung will be speaking at NEXT 2009, a charismatic conference. I’m loving the way in which charismatics and conservatives are slowly beginning to come together and make the gospel central and not particular emphases. In the process they’re both learning from each other – epic.

Tim Chester on Leadership

Chester has a really helpful set of expectations that he uses to evaluate and keep leaders accountable.

Lekota thinks Malema is a Threat

Mosiuoa Lekota thinks that Julius Malema is more of a problem than simply being a joke in the political arena of South Africa. I guess it’s easy to laugh a guy like Malema off without making a stand on the fact that the actions and speech of Malema are simply unacceptable in a country claiming to be democratic.