Disciples Who Hear God's Voice

Thank you Michael Smith for this awesome Kenyan sunrise at the CMM compound. T his year was the first Wellspring Mission Trip in who knows how long. I took my family along with the team, but I booked our flights really early in the year, before I even knew we would have a team going. Therefore our travel was not together.  The team arrived EARLY Sunday morning, got about 3 hours of sleep, and went to church. They are troopers. Meanwhile, my family was traveling, and we arrived EARLY Monday morning, got 3 hours of sleep, and met the team for breakfast.  Monday was the day when all the pastors would begin arriving for the CMM conference, where we would be ministering to 700 pastors from all across Africa. The first ministry was to carry their bags to their rooms for them. It’s hard for us to imagine how impactful that simple act of service was. Ronnie Matheny told us that it would be mind-blowing for these pastors to show up to find mzungus (white people) carrying THEIR bags rat...

Many of you are aware that we are entering into a season of Bible reading and Scripture memory as a church. Last week, we read Matthew Chapters 1 & 2. If you remember way back in 2023, we started our Gospel of the Kingdom series, and I began preaching through Matthew one passage at a time, so as we read as a church, we will be covering familiar ground for a little while. If you want to learn more about how to read scripture effectively, and if you want to stay on track as we read together, visit the scripture reading page on our website! www.wellspringdfw.org/bible-reading-memorization ______________________________ Last Sunday, I made a big to-do about bringing your physical Bible to church on Sundays. I’m a big fan of getting well acquainted with a good, old-fashioned physical Bible. However, afterward, a church member shared her Bible discipline with me, and I found that she has a really good relationship with the scriptures and ONLY reads electronic Bible sources, listens to t...

 I have two small-ish and probably pretty nerdy corrections to make about something I said in last week's sermon. I made two mistakes when I was talking about the Septuagint and the Hebrew language. Mistake #1: I said that Hebrew had gone extinct at one point. That's not correct. Ancient Hebrew never went extinct because it, like Latin in Catholic Mass and Koine Greek in Bible translations, continued to be used, studied, and understood in certain religious contexts (including Bible translation). Because no one spoke it as a native language, but because many people learned it in a religious/educational context, it was a dead language, not extinct. (Click here for an article about Extinct vs Dead languages ) If it had ever fallen out of use in religious things, it would have gone extinct. Mistake #2: Ironically, because I made this mistake ALSO, it made my ultimate point still valid and even a little MORE interesting now that we're clearing it up. I said the Septuagint was w...