Joshua's drawing skills are greatly improving.  While he stills does a fair amount of indecipherable scribbling, once in a while he produce a picture that actually looks like something.  When we asked him about the picture below, Joshua told us the following story (which Mommy wrote on the top of the picture): "A porcupine shot its quill at the soldier but missed.  Then, the soldier shot it with a gun, and the porcupine died."  I think that if I ever encountered a porcupine that big, I might shoot it too.

Click on the picture to view the full size version.

In my last post, we began to look at the problem of preaching that uses the Bible but misses the point of what the Bible is saying.  In the next three posts, we will look at three common forms of unbiblical preaching - moralistic preaching, allegorical preaching, and gnostic preaching.  There is a lot of overlap between these three but they are distinct enough to put them in separate categories - even though they may all show up in a single sermon.  In this post, we’ll take a look at moralistic preaching.

Moralistic Preaching and Buddhism
Moralistic preaching is all about getting people to be good.  Thai Buddhists believe that the point of every religion in the world (including Christianity) is to teach people to be good.  And if they listened to the sermons in many churches on Sunday morning, their belief would be confirmed.  Instead of telling listeners about Christ, the cross, and the drama of redemption which winds through the whole of Scripture, moralistic preachers tell people, “Be good and God will bless you.”  The need for forgiveness is not emphasized nearly as much as the need to try harder to be a better person.  This type of preaching is familiar to people from a Buddhist background because it is the same type of sermon that Buddhist monks give.  

In the following video, four year old Joshua leads worship at his "pretend church" at home, playing and singing "This is the Day" on drums and xylophone