I Don’t Understand This Part
Look at difficult passages in the Bible as opportunities for growth, but also understand that they can be dangerous.
How should you proceed when you reach a Bible passage that you simply don’t understand? Imagine for a moment that you’ve just run across a difficult part of Scripture. You’re like a tourist who has lost his way. Which way do you turn? What street do you go down? First, let me point out a... Continue Reading
The Difference Between Magic And Ministry
There is no more magic. There are no more priests, no more sacrifices.
When our ministers are ordained, they are set apart for a sacred work. They are installed into their office. Authority to speak as ministers comes with the office. They have authority to administer the two sacraments that Christ instituted: holy baptism (the sign and seal of initiation into the covenant community) and holy communion (the... Continue Reading
The Ten Commandments: What They Forbid and Promote
There’s more to the ten commandments than what first meets the eye.
There’s more to the 10 commandments than we usually think. Yes, all 10 commandments still matter today. We should take them seriously and seek to study and appropriately apply them to our lives. You might be able to list the ten commandments in order, but do you know what they forbid and promote? I... Continue Reading
When Your God Can’t Talk, You Hear Exactly What You Want
Let us be careful to not mistake the voice of God for the voice of an idol.
We challenge that doctrine or Scripture because we don’t want it to be true. If it were true, it would mean something in our lives or our thinking would have to change. So we explain it away. We even go so far as tricking ourselves into thinking that God is saying something different than what... Continue Reading
5 Tips for Reading the Song of Songs
When we talk about the human-level love relationship in its ideal form, we really are talking about the love of all loves.
It’s not a long book, so I encourage people to read Song of Songs through pretty rapidly and then go back and read it again. Maybe read it rapidly a couple times, and then go back and try to study it more closely. It’s a short enough book that you can definitely read it, read... Continue Reading
Do you Have the Reflex of Love?
“From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh.” –2 Corinthians 5:16
The Corinthians had determined that Paul was a loon. But he kept preaching the gospel to them because he knew that this would be the means by which they’d get a new set of eyes. Apart from grace, though, they’d put gospel men in the loser category every time. And they’d fall hard after super-apostles…even... Continue Reading
Why It Makes Sense to Persevere in Prayer
Perseverance cultivates patience.
Persistent praying puts us in that frame of mind and spirit in which we may properly receive what it is that God desires to give. In other words, it isn’t so much that God is reluctant to give, but that we lack preparation to receive. Try to envision what a mess your life would have... Continue Reading
Lip Service
We might ask ourselves how many times we have sung a song or prayed a prayer where our lips formed the words but our minds were elsewhere, our hearts far from God.
Jesus castigated ritualistic worship for its hypocrisy. If we are true believers who have bowed the knee in repentance and faith to rest upon Christ alone for our salvation, we tend not to think ourselves as hypocrites. But the word hypocrite can simply mean to be insincere. Our worship can be a pretense of going through the motions.... Continue Reading
Do This and Remember
The Supper invites us to remember the Lord Jesus Christ, on whose body we feed and whose blood we drink, through faith in him.
The Lord’s Supper represents to the senses of God’s people the death of Christ for sinners. It reinforces one of the most basic lessons of Jesus’s teaching, that salvation is by the grace of God alone for the undeserving. In the Supper, Christ invites his needy people to come to him to be filled with... Continue Reading
Compressing Spiritual Growth in the Age of Acceleration
The opinion of this young man, and of our age, is that super-spirituality is most attainable by those who ingest the highest quantity of edifying media.
Rosa’s basic argument is that our western experience is a forever-accelerating economic system, reinforced politically and socially. Said another way, acceleration is the desire we feel to collapse life into a series of discrete moments and experiences — email to email, tweet to tweet, text to text, snap to snap, meeting to meeting, image to image, and... Continue Reading