Listening

I'm trying to become a better listener. And, if the quotes Tim Challies has given are correct, I will have a lot of explaining to do, one day about all the times I didn't listen to my minister well.

Do Christians have to give account of every idle word, every sin as well as non-Christians? How does this relate to having no fear on judgment day, because Jesus has taken our punishment?

Many Ways to Destroy a Church

Tim Challies cites this powerful passage from Don Carson's The Cross and Christian Ministry:

The ways of destroying the church are many and colorful.
Raw factionalism will do it.
Rank heresy will do it.
Taking your eyes off the cross and letting other, more peripheral matters dominate the agenda will do it-admittedly more slowly than frank heresy, but just as effectively over the long haul.
Building the church with superficial 'conversions' and wonderful programs that rarely bring people into a deepening knowledge of the living God will do it.
Entertaining people to death but never fostering the beauty of holiness or the centrality of self-crucifying love will build an assembling of religious people, but it will destroy the church of the living God.
Gossip,
prayerlessness,
bitterness,
sustained biblical illiteracy,
self-promotion,
materialism
-all of these things, and many more, can destroy a church.
And to do so is dangerous:
If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him; for God's temple is sacred, and you are that temple (1 Cor. 3:17).
It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.