Taylor Mertins

God is intense, passionate, unbalanced, unfair, and a little too honest. God is always pushing the envelope, testing the boundaries of what we might call “proper behavior.” God is the one who sees a vision of the world that even on our best days we could never properly imagine. And we wonder, why can’t God just calm down about all this stuff? If God really wants to be the God of all people, wouldn...

The cross speaks the deepest and darkest truth about who we are. We are the sinners for whom Christ died. I like to call that the inconvenient truth of Christianity. We’ve become very good these days, frankly we have lots of practice, at pointing out the sins in other people. To some degree I think that’s what social media is all about. We either log on to call out the imperfections of others, or...

God promises to do what is impossible for humankind, God calls into existence things that do not exist, God is the subject of the verb. If it were all on us, if it were all up to us, we would fail. We can’t bless the world because we are far too concerned with blessing ourselves. We can’t fix the world because we are so fixated on our own problems. We can’t redeem the world because we are the ones...

Whenever we hear about Adam and Eve in church, it is usually discussed in one of two ways: 1) We're told about how bad we are and how badly we need to feel about how bad we are. We leave church wallowing in self-pity and feeling even more exhausted than we did on the way in for all of our sins, past, present, and future. Or 2) We’re told all about how people outside the walls of the church are bad...

As Christians we cannot ignore the condition of our condition, we cannot fool ourselves into believing that we are better than anyone else - we are sinners resting in the hands of a loving God. That we can call God a loving God is what makes all the difference. For, it is in the same moment that we can truly acknowledge our brokenness that we also begin to see God as the One who offers mercy to us...

None is righteous, no, not one. That’s the point of the Law - on our own we can’t even fulfill a fraction of it. All that stuff that Moses brought down from the mountain, it is good only insofar as it shows us that we, all of us, are bad. We’re all bad no matter how good we think we are and no matter how good we think other people are. Because behind closed doors, when we think we’re alone, or tha...

We tend to think that we have to save ourselves, and we’ve forgotten that the cross stands to show us how Christ is already in the business of putting us back together, in ways we’d rather not if it were up to us. But thanks be to God that’s its not up to us, because if it were all we’d achieve is more of the same instead of the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God on earth. If it were up to us we’d...

The cross is where God meets us in our own lives. In all of our suffering, in all of our sins, in our shames and pains. And that is downright scandalous because it rubs against so much of what we’ve been taught to think and speak. If we’ve left church feeling guilty for all the things we should have done, or for all the things we left undone, then we’ve missed the scandal of the cross. The scandal...

For as much as the cross is a sign to the world about the forgiveness of sins, it is equally a reminder that we have plenty of sins for which we all need forgiveness. Or, to put it another way, we cannot look at the cross without confronting the inconvenient truth that we are the sinners for whom Christ died. We confess, however, that we would much prefer to hear a different kind of message about...

The letters of Paul and the stories of Jesus show us that there is more to grace than simply being accepted for who we are. And, no doubt, we are accepted - after all, grace abounds. But we are now in a kingdom bound by that grace which means we have been changed. Can you imagine what Martin Luther King Jr.'s work would’ve have looked like without a call to change? What good is a dream of somethin...

Here’s the kicker about tragic occurrences in the world - the best thing Christians can do (other than offering signs of help and support) is to just be quiet. The unyielding desire to discern some greater meaning, or meaninglessness, behind it all, is cruel and presumptuous. Any time we, and by we I mean Christians, offer pious platitudes or trite words of comfort it only results in our soothing...

How big is the "all" of "that all shall be saved"?

In Jesus’ kingdom trespasses are forgiven, grace is given, enemies are prayed for, peace is practiced, and all of our earthly differences are swallowed up because its more important for us to swallow the body and blood of Christ at this table together. In the end, our personal politics might not line up with what Jesus had to say and what Jesus had to do, but Jesus was political, and the church al...

Our world is constantly telling us to do more, to be better, and to get it all together. And even in the church, we fall prey to this temptation all the time by telling people about all the stuff we need to do. But all of that is self-defeating because the more we’re told about what we’re supposed to do the more guilty we feel for all we’re not doing. On Christmas Eve its different. Its different...

Part of what makes us/Christians different is that we know that we no longer belong to ourselves and we haven’t been left to our own devices. We belong to Jesus Christ who came into the world to take us and our burdens upon his shoulders. We belong to Jesus Christ who sees and knows our sins and nails them to the cross anyway. We belong to Jesus Christ whose birth we mark in the manger, and whose...

We are at our strangest when we confess the dissonance of two Biblical truths: All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God AND there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. In other words, all of us are sinners AND Jesus saves us anyway. That we confess “Jesus saves us anyway” is why we can call the Good News good. God does for us what we could not do for ourse...

Ultimately one of the strangest things about who we are and what we’re doing is that we’re not really called to do much of anything at all. If anything, the only thing we have to do is celebrate that we don’t have to do anything. That’s the message of Jesus and his cross. God came to do what we could not and would not do. No amount of belief, or money, or morals can give salvation to us nor take i...

Salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers. For many of us, that moment of becoming believers came with a catch - if we believe this, then God will do this. Or if we lay aside our sins, then God will give us eternal life as our everlasting reward. Or if we promise to love God with our whole hearts, souls, minds, and strengths, then God will love us back. But there is no such thing...

I’ve noted a few times recently that it often doesn’t help the church to just spend time addressing what’s wrong in other churches. And I want to own that - I know that. But sometimes we have to know what’s wrong in order to know what is right. If the church tells us that we need to put America first, then it is not God’s church. If the church tells us that some people are in and some people are o...

Sometimes it feels like the church is in the midst of a crisis. It should come as no surprise that less and less people come to church week after week, the world feels like is twirling down the drain faster than ever before, and that’s not even getting into the specifics of cultural and societal changes. But if the church really is in a crisis it is because we have foolishly convinced ourselves th...

Jesus changes everything. That is what I want to tell people when I hear them talk about their better half, or their lesser half. No one becomes less of a person when they get married! Or at least they shouldn’t. We are unique and beautiful and wondrous because that's exactly who God created us to be. And yet, of course, we were made to be in community, but that doesn’t mean we lose part of who we...

Whether its Rome, or America, or our bosses, or our spouses, or whoever - we are forever being told who we are. We define ourselves by the definitions given to us by others, and more often than not from the others with power. When we look in the mirror we see not what we see but we see what we’ve been told. But for Christians, none of us know who we really are until God tells us.

God cares not at all how much money we put in the offering plate or how much money we send to our favorite charity or how much money we make every two weeks or how much money we have saved away for a rainy day. God cares only that we see and know and taste and touch the wondrous gift already given to us in Jesus. What happens next is a matter of faith.

God sees potential in God’s creation in a frame of reference often beyond our ability to grasp. God believes in God’s people as a long term investment - it takes a lifetime of hearing about the goodness of grace before it really sticks. But God keeps saving anyway. Even when things in the present scream the contrary, God keeps pouring out the Holy Spirit on a bunch of investments that no one in th...

I’ve grown tired of the endless stories of the self-made individuals, of the people who earned their own fortune without the help from anyone else. No one is self-made. Period. We are all creatures created by God - we’ve all been purposed with gifts to participate in the kingdom in ways both big and small. In the eyes of God the richest person on earth is of the same value as the poorest person on...