A great sermon to start 2026

-

I watched this online Willow Creek sermon yesterday from a new series called The Jesus Way, about the Sermon on the Mount... and I just gotta share it because I haven't heard a sermon this good in awhile.  In fact, it's one of the best I've heard in a long time.  A great way to start 2026!  

Maybe it just said what I needed to hear at this point in my life.  Maybe it won't speak to you the same way.  But, who knows, maybe it will.  Give it a try.  What've you got to lose?  

Most Popular Posts of the Week:

List of Calvinist Preachers, Authors, Theologians, Websites, etc.

-
I  found a lot more names to add to my list of known Calvinists (found in my various  "How to Tell if a Church, Pastor, or Website is Calvinist"  posts).  But instead of adding this huge list to all those posts, I am going to put it here, and I'll just provide a link on those posts to this one.  [FYI: I added a note at the bottom of this post on May 5, 2021.] So here it is, a "master list" of known Calvinists to help you be careful and discerning about who you listen to and where you get your theology from.  There are plenty more Calvinists out there, but these are just the names that I ran across the most.   These are either definite, self-professed Calvinists or "most likely Calvinist," in my estimation.  (I haven't heard of most of them, but it's good to know their theology before I do.)   After finding these names in various places online, I looked up each person to see if they are Calvinist.  If they did not self-identify ...
Read more

Help for Anxiety, Depression, and Suicidal Thoughts

-
It's so sad to hear about all the celebrities who have recently committed suicide (or about anyone who has committed suicide, for that matter).  My heart breaks for them, for the pain they went through, and for the ones who love them, for the pain they are now going through.  It is truly a tragedy. To anyone who is hurting really badly, who is struggling with overwhelming anxiety or depression, who is considering taking their own lives ... I dedicate this post.  Please, take some time to look through some of the links here.  This is a round-up of some on-line resources or posts about dealing with anxiety or depression, particularly as a Christian. But first: Quick tips for help: If you are desperate for some immediate help and don't want to look through the links I have below, try some of these (or if it's really bad and you think you might hurt yourself, call 911 or go to the emergency room): 1.   Put on a worship song right now.  Or sin...
Read more

God's Greatest Priority (and why there's a hell)

-
Image
Calvinists believe that God's greatest priority - His primary reason for making people - is to get more glory for Himself, and that He gets it through ordaining sin and predestining people to hell.  They think that this is why people are in hell: for God's glory, that He gets glory when He shows off His justice by punishing sin and evil.  And so He needed sin and evil and non-elect people to punish or else He couldn't fully display all His attributes to get praise and glory for them.   [But remember that - in Calvinism - people don't actually get to choose whether or not they want to believe in Jesus.  God decides for them.  He decides who won't believe and prevents them from being able to believe, and then He punishes them for not believing, even though they never had the chance or ability to believe, by God's decree.  This is a  far different  kind of "justice" than punishing people who actually deserve it, who had a choice.  In fact, ...
Read more

Calvinism's Heart-Breaking Destruction

-
Wanna see some of the real-life destruction that Calvinism does to hearts, souls, and faith?   Here are some comments (warning: bad language ahead) from a Reddit post called  "Calvinism is disgusting" , showing how people - who don't realize that Calvinism is NOT biblical - have been hurt by Calvinism and have ended up rejecting God altogether instead of just rejecting Calvinism.  Sadly, it's because they don't know that there's a  big difference  between the God of the Bible and the god of Calvinism, between the Bible's hope-filled gospel and Calvinism's sick, hopeless, twisted half-gospel. The reddit post starts out with this comment (I added punctuation to make it easier to read):  "I had a discussion with a Calvinist last night and it's more gross than I thought.  After questioning him for over an hour, it basically boiled down to the dude admitting that god predestined innocent children to a life of suffering and then hell, and that same ...
Read more

My Problem With Calvinism Is Not Really About Free-Will, But It's About ...

-
Image
  I was thinking last night about how Calvinists think that free-will is the big reason other people don't want to believe in Calvinism, as in "Well, you don't like the idea of not being in control of your own choices, and so that's why you won't accept Calvinism."   They use this to  shame anti-Calvinists, such as when my Calvi-pastor at our ex-church would say these things in sermons: "Most Americans have a hard time accepting God's sovereignty [a Calvinist's definition of it!].  They don't like the idea of someone being in authority over them.  They like to think they are in control of themselves, self-sufficient, standing on their own two feet.  And so they won't humble themselves before Him.  They  resist the idea of God being in control over them, of His sovereignty, because they like their free-will too much." But you know what? It's not about free-will.   My biggest grievance against Calvinism is not about a desire to have...
Read more

This One's For You! (A Christmas Sermon)

-
Did you ever listen to a sermon where you felt as if God was saying "This one's for you"?  I've never looked up Willow Creek sermons before, but for some reason I decided to watch one yesterday.  And you know what?  This one was meant for me.  It really hit me in the heart.  Watch it; it's good.  In fact, I couldn't stop thinking about it all day and into the night.  (Skip to the 35-minute mark to start the sermon.) "Christmas at the movies: How the Grinch Stole Christmas (December 18, 2022)" (Willow Creek Huntley YouTube channel) Merry Christmas, Everyone! [FYI: I've written before about how I disagree with woman being head pastors.  And it seems that, at Willow, the head pastor is a man but there are several teaching pastors under him, including women.  To me, that's a gray area.  And I'm not sure yet what I think of it.  But  since it doesn't break my hardline, definitive "no woman head pastor" rule , I've decided to ...
Read more

Calvin's Contradictions (simplified)

-
  In the comment section of a Soteriology 101 post -  Flowers Man Bad  - someone (Simon Peter) was defending John Calvin, quoting him as saying  "the gate of salvation is open to all," making it sound like he thought Calvin really taught that salvation is truly available for all and possible for all.   I replied that Calvin contradicts himself in his writing, and so I wouldn't believe what he said in one place because he would contradict it or qualify it or add another layer to it in another place, changing what he originally said.   Simon Peter replied: " A sign of being a great scholar is the ability to change one’s mind and improve one’s system of thought. Calvin had that ability, as did Luther and many other great theologians.  In this light I would ask you to demonstrate the alleged contradictions from Calvin’s writings?" I'm guessing he thought that I made a baseless, ignorant comment, that I didn't have anything to back me up. And so I...
Read more

9 Marks of a Calvinist Cult #2 (hidden agendas)

-
Image
[This series is  "The 9 Marks of a Calvinist Cult"  split up into smaller, individual posts.]   (Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow!) 2.  Hidden Agendas Not only do Stealth Calvinist pastors get into churches using deception, but they come in with the hidden agenda to reform the church, to slowly drag it into Calvinism without the awareness of the people. A post called  "The Church Infected with Calvinism"  shares this:  " This third scenario [of how Calvinism infects a church] is all too common.  There are websites that instruct Calvinistic preachers who accept calls to non-Calvinistic churches on how to gradually 'acclimate' the church to Calvinism.  I saw one website with a two-year, month-by-month plan for the stealth Calvinist to take a non-Calvinistic church into 'Reformed Theology' land.  It's almost cult-like and certainly deceptive...  While the Calvinistic pastor is crafting pulpit content to fortify his philosophical argume...
Read more

Update to "Letter To Our Elders," About Teaching Predestination in the Kids' Classes

-
I added this update to the post  "Letter To Our Elders Regarding Calvinism That's Growing In Our Church,"  but I wanted to put it in it's own post too.  Just because.   (FYI, Our ex-church is an Evangelical Free Church, and these churches are being taken over by Calvinism all over the place.  Nearly 40% of EVFree churches are Calvinist, and I believe that number will grow.  See  this post  for more on that.)    In that letter, I didn't have any real requests for the elders other than that they try to reel in the pastor about how dogmatic he is about his Calvinism ... and that they did not teach predestination (the Calvinist version) in the kids' classes without at least notifying the parents or asking their permission first.  Because this is a highly debatable issue.  And so the parents should be able to decide what they want their kids to hear about it, especially since it strongly affects people's faith and view of God....
Read more

How can Calvinists be effective in spiritual warfare?

-
I was thinking of this last night as I fell asleep:   How can a Calvinist be effective in spiritual warfare when they believe ... ... that God has predestined the way everything will happen, and nothing we do can change it? ... that God ultimately causes us to do what we do, so we have no real control over our actions anyway? ... that everything that happens is because God caused it to happen that way, everything that happens is His Will?  (So why bother fighting against anything that happens?) ... that God always causes demons to do exactly what they do, for His Will and His glory?  (So then I guess the whole "spiritual battle" is really just a farce anyway, a dramatic play.  So why should we try to work against demons, because wouldn't that really be working against "God's Will" and the things He's doing "for His glory"?) ... that prayer is really just a meaningless formality that doesn't have any effect on anything bec...
Read more