The church is a dysfunctional family. There is no escaping some degree of drama. Drama and dysfunction are like bad weather. You can build houses and structures that keep the elements out, but the weather is still battering the house, and you yourself cannot always avoid it (e.g. like when you are coming home from […]
The best sermon ever preached didn’t happen in a sanctuary …it happened on a mountainside (Matthew 5:1). Jesus loved being on mountains (Matthew 14:23; 15:29: 17:1; 28:16). Mountains are metaphors for the most edifying experiences of life. The rigors of acclimatizing to altitude, the perseverance required to hike, the problem solving required to climb, the […]
What makes someone truly great? What is the zenith of wisdom and maturity? Who should we esteem and celebrate as the most distinguished and exemplary people on the planet? Or to put it another way… what if God Himself were to appoint a group of people to positions of prominence and authority? What should they […]
“Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” – Christian Apologist
Who is on your TOP 5 list of people you’d like to grab a beer with and chat? Rahab the prostitute is on my TOP 5 list! And Joshua the son of Nun sent two men secretly from Shittim as spies, saying, “Go, view the land, especially Jericho.” And they went and came into the […]
I was imaginatively inhabiting Paul’s letters to the people in Colossae this morning. Philemon lived in Colossae! So when you imaginatively immerse yourself in Paul’s letter to Colossae you must also diligently envisage the rigors and jubilation of Philemon’s relationship with Paul and Onesimus! Moreover, the Laodicea community was 20km down the road from Colossae, […]
Here’s the deal. God made the world, and then we said, “We’ll take it from here!” Things got bad. Shockingly, God didn’t give us the silent treatment. He mercifully gave us His Word! So we decided to become scholars of God’s Word. Not so much practitioners, but definitely scholars. We accumulated religious information, and we […]
Here’s a quotation from our friend Eugene about feelings… “My feelings are important for many things. They are essential and valuable. They keep me aware of much that is true and real. But they tell me next to nothing about God or my relation to God. My security comes from who God is, not from […]
I ran across this small batch of quotations from our good buddy Eugene this morning. I now share them with you bloggy-blog readers, and I exhort and encourage you to mull them over for a minimum of 7 seconds 7 reps. “The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing something before I know […]
Almost everyone I’ve crossed paths with in the past month has revealed in some way their desperate need for the substance and sentiment of the following quotation: “And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily–open myself to the frustrations and failures of […]