Tag: Christ

My Personal Testimony

By Asher Witmer Motivation & Inspiration
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Life is rarely cookie-cutter simple. Whether it’s relationships, family, money, following God, church, our jobs, or deciding which jeans to buy, life isn’t as easy as we wish it was.

Some people live as if life is a formula to be solved, but there is no formula to solve the disillusionment and confusion we sometimes feel. Perhaps that’s why I like to tackle issues on this blog that are relevant to my generation. I want this blog to be a place that helps people sort through the hard questions they face.

It seems to be resonating.

In the last year, the readership on this blog has increased by more than six hundred percent (600%). I typically assume that my readers know me and where I come from, but as is natural with such growth and as I’ve been discovering over the last six months, many, if not most, of my readers don’t know my background. So I thought that this week I would share with you my personal testimony.

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3 Reasons American Christians Don’t Want Syrian Refugees (and what to do about it)

By Asher Witmer Christian Spirituality

Five times a day, the descendants of Ishmael cry before Lord. And God hears it. God hears their cry and calls us, the partakers of the free gift through that one man Jesus Christ, to His answer to their cry and share it with them.

But we don’t go.

Churches in America send one missionary per million Muslims. We are neglecting the call of Christ on our lives as receivers of the abundance of God’s grace and of the free gift of righteousness.

So God is sending them to us.

In droves.

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A Better Way to Solve Gun Violence

By Asher Witmer Motivation & Inspiration
photopin photo

Another shooting happened this past week that directly targeted Christians. While most Christians seem primarily worried about the government restricting their use of arms through gun laws, I’m beginning to ask a few questions.

What if there was a better way to solve gun violence than through politics? I’m conservative, and certainly don’t like the thought of only the government being in control of weapons, but what if all that shouldn’t matter to us as Christians?

One Christian senator encouraged fellow Christians to carry personal weapons for self-defense. How does that line up with following Christ? Jesus healed the man his disciples struck with a sword in defense of Him.

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Why I’m Mennonite (and why that’s not the point)

By Asher Witmer Popular Posts, Spiritual Formation

I took a risk in asking some questions last week about Mennonite distinctives. I framed the questions so they would be probing, yet wide-open for any and all to answer. It felt risky, and proved to be so.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a pressure point. Call me naïve, but I honestly didn’t realize asking these questions would produce as many fireworks as it did. My intention was not to create an argument or discredit our Anabaptist heritage. It’s just that there are a few things I wanted to share with my generation and felt I had to first ask some (risky) questions.

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Worn-Out Parents Like to Hear This Important Truth

By Asher Witmer Relationships, Spiritual Formation

I used to think that to develop holiness you need to develop good spiritual disciplines. But when I got married and started having children, I ran into trouble.

No matter how hard I tried and no matter how disciplined I had been before, my “good spiritual disciplines” kept getting interrupted by the responsibilities of marriage and parenting. It’s not uncommon for my wife and I to stay up late talking. Those times are good and needed. But then it’s harder to wake up in the morning.

Recently, this happened on a Friday evening and I thought we’d be able to sleep in the next day because it’s Saturday, right? Both our boys woke up at 6:30 the next morning. We had been up ‘till after midnight. It had been a busy week. All I wanted to do was sleep!

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What I Learned about Discipleship From 18 Months on Drew Street

By Asher Witmer Spiritual Formation

I think the church in general misunderstands discipleship. We like programs where we go out and invite people to come to our building, tell them a cute Bible lesson, and then send them home. That way we don’t have to deal with them day in and day out. We can choose when we want to “minister” and when we don’t.

A couple of months ago I heard the news that a friend of mine became, in his words, “a child of God.” I never felt so excited!

While I wasn’t there for that experience, I had the privilege of walking with him through quite a bit in the last couple of years. You see, this friend was our fourteen year-old neighbor on Drew Street, a street in North Eastern Los Angeles notorious for crime and drug dealing.

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