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Suffer Well
A friend of mine had a catch phrase of sorts that he used to tell me all the time: “Suffer well.” American Christianity is one that often likes to yell “Persecution!” every time something makes them feel ostracized or uncomfortable. In other countries Christians are willingly persecuted to death, but we sometimes lose our minds…
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Pharisees VS Sadducees… FIGHT!
As a bunch of us pastors broke into groups to pray for an urgent issue in someone’s life, I took the spiritual route and prayed that God would stop any spiritual warfare related to the situation. The pastor that followed me then prayed for the situation from a mental health perspective, which I was totally…
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What Are the Locusts of Revelation?
Many of the angelic trumpet plagues of Revelation are explained quickly and to the point. But once we get to the locusts, John pauses to give a lot of detail to what he’s seeing. This unusual amount of detail causes many readers to assign the locusts to various things past, present, and future. In this…
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Piecing it Together
In this message, I take a plethora of words, dreams, and visions given to 1208 over the years and try to piece together the themes in front of everyone as we move into our next season at church.
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Contextualizing the Gospel
I had a great time joining my friends over at First Baptist Church here in Jackson this past Sunday. I preached on the clever ways in which Paul changed his preaching style in order to reach the philosophers in Athens and why that matters to us today. You can start the video at 00:40:01. While…
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Jesus Trances
When I’m counseling people, I often ask them to close their eyes and imagine Jesus. Once they’ve done so, we ask the Holy Spirit meet with us in that space. Once while doing this, the person I was working with needed to give Jesus a part of their pain, so I asked them to reach…
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Unweirding Myself
“As I listened to you preach I thought to myself, ‘Isn’t this a Methodist Church? This guy’s gonna get himself in trouble!’” a pastoral friend told me after visiting a service where I preached about the Holy Spirit in a rather Pentecostal fashion. I’ve gotten comments similar to this over the years. While I’m certainly…
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The Book Everyone Judged But Never Read
Back in 2011, megachurch Pastor Rob Bell released a book that got him in a lot of trouble with the wider Christian world. It all started with a book trailer where he offered a few provocative thoughts on the traditional view of Hell. Like all book trailers, the point of this one was to say…
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When the Holy Spirit Gets Misinterpreted
I recently had a dream that a construction worker knocked down one of our church walls, claiming that there was poison in it. Another person had a picture come to their mind a few weeks later of our church walls falling over so everyone could see inside. I had been wondering at the time if…
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When People Become Dollar Signs
After many years, an old friend reached out to me out of the blue to see if he could come by my house, see my family and catch up. We arranged some time and about 30 minutes into our conversation, that uncomfortable shift happened: “So the real reason I wanted to catch up was…” Usually…
Jamin Bradley 