Jesus Creed
Lightning Atkinson, a student of mine who is praying and planning to plant a church with his wife Sara, now has a nice blogsite, called Churchbrew, and he has already put up some good ones. (more…) Read more
Lightning Atkinson, a student of mine who is praying and planning to plant a church with his wife Sara, now has a nice blogsite, called Churchbrew, and he has already put up some good ones. (more…) Read more
I will shortly begin a short series of four posts on the “The (inner journey) of a Prayerful Person,” which will be my take on four kinds of Psalms. This is a modification of Walter Brueggemann’s Spirituality of the Psalms. Read more
Full-scale missional work, as we see in Matthew 10:37-39, moves from love to sacrifice. He who loves anyone more than me, Jesus says, is not worthy of me. Anyone is clear, and a very forceful. But… (more…) Read more
If you like blogging as much as I do, it is worth the effort and cost to move over from a generic brand to WordPress. The change for me has been efficient and has permitted me a variety of new features, not the least of which is the Categories and the poll. Dave Anderson, from Bemus Point on the shores of Lake Chautauqua (western New York) built mine, and you can contact him through the e-mail link at the bottom... Read more
The original post and then a follow-up on what I labeled “grace grinding” has generated far more attention than I expected. There has been plenty of activity on my blog but also on others, including especially the Jolly Blogger. I’ve been asked to give some concrete examples, and so I do so here. (more…) Read more
Missional work can be divisive. It doesn’t have to be, often it is not, but sometimes it is. One of Jesus’ harder and harsher words is this: “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth — I did not come to bring peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). And often misunderstood, too. (more…) Read more
Lukas, my son, decided to try to run a half-marathon without training. Read his own story about it. Laura, my daughter, is running hers this weekend — only she’s been training for months. Read more
This is getting to be a long series, but Matthew 10 is long and it is important to stick it out to see what Jesus has to say about missional work. In our verses today, Matthew 10:26-33, there is a strong warning on Jesus’ part: fear God and don’t fear humans. (more…) Read more
Believe it or not, I was once a cross country runner. Believe it or not, I ran for my college team. But here’s the skinny: my basketball coach in college came to me and said that the cross country team was down a runner and needed one more runner to start the race and finish the race, regardless of place, and if they couldn’t find that runner, then they’d not be able to enter the big meet. Well, we had... Read more
Scot: I like Doug Pagitt’s idea of “implicating†the audience in the text and sermon. That is, he argues that “application†is an insufficient term to describe the full intention of what the Bible wants from us as we hear the Word. He suggests the Bible, and the sermon as the working out of the Bible in a local setting, implicates our lives in the story of the Bible. (more…) Read more
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