Known and Loved

In 1939 Tolkien gave a lecture at St Andrews on the subject of Fairy Tales. It was transcribed into an essay and the basic questions he grappled with were: “What IS a Fairy Tale?” And what is the “USE of a Fairy Tale?” Tolkien and his friend CS Lewis would argue that Fairy Tales are not just for children- they are serious literature for adults too. Fairy Tales engage our imaginations and contain i...

Who is my neighbor? This is the question the lawyer asks Jesus in Luke 10. Jesus answers him with the famous parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus asks the lawyer to answer: Who is the true neighbor to the fallen man? The lawyer answers just as Jesus intended: The one who showed mercy. Then Jesus instructs him- GO and DO likewise. So who is your neighbor? And how can we set aside our pride to “Go a...

What is the obstacle for us that must be moved out of the way so that we can really be servants and love our neighbor as ourselves? Ultimately it is our pride, our “ego” that we wear as an outer garment to protect and define ourselves. It is our pride that directs us inward to selfishness and says not to love and serve our neighbor, but to serve ourselves… What does this look like and how can it b...

What does it mean when Jesus says to “love your neighbor as yourself? Do we really have a good idea of what that means? We spend the next three episodes examining the radical call to love our neighbor, the obstacles to love and finally defining exactly WHO our neighbor might be based on Jesus’ teachings in  Luke chapter 10.

What does it mean to love God with all our strength?  There are 3 ways to consider this. First, strength means well toned muscles. So in order to Love God with all my strength I need a faith and a love for God that is well toned. Another way to define strength is as something that we have in abundance or something that we are particularly good at doing. So loving God with all our strength is to lo...

Webster's dictionary defines the soul as the spiritual part of us. The soul is our deeply felt moral and emotional being. These characteristics are only present in rational beings- that would mean human beings. It is our soul that embodies the deepest part of us and it drives our search for meaning and purpose in this world. So what does it mean to love the Lord our God with all of our soul?

What does it mean to love the Lord our God with all our mind? How does our thinking about God shape who we are and how we relate to the world? We started answering these questions last episode as part of our series on the Greatest Commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your MIND and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Today we go deeper into...

What is the purpose of the mind in our faith? How does what we think about God shape who we are? The Greatest Commandment says to Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your MIND and all your strength. There is an important aspect to our loving God and others, that is more than just an emotional rush.  Real love is deliberate. It is purposeful. It is thoughtful and it takes...

What is love? What does it mean to love? What does it mean to love God with all our hearts? In today’s episode we are beginning in earnest our examination of the Greatest Commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your HEART, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Love is by definition relational which means that love is not just an emotion descri...

In this next series of Known and Loved we are going to explore Jesus’ greatest commandment aiming to understand what it means to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and to love others as we love ourselves. We will also be trying to understand that this God of ours is EPIC and multidimensional- That’s why we do need to love him and each other with all of these facets o...

Spiritual disciplines don’t exist to restrict us, they exist to free us. We enter in them confined and then emerge on the other side finding life and open spaces. We close this series by looking at tips for how to be successful in motivating our hearts to embrace a Secret Life with God, understanding this is how we build intimacy with the God of the universe who knows and loves us. This is how we...

How do we motivate ourselves to engage in Spiritual disciplines? In our last episode we said we need to make two important perspective shifts. The first, which we covered in Episode 35 is: The Bible is not about you! The Bible is about God and what he has done for you. Today we are going to look at perspective shift #2: Quality Time. Spiritual Disciplines of praying, fasting and giving in secret a...

Spiritual disciplines are often duties before they become delights. If you only practice spiritual disciplines for immediate gratification then you’ll stop doing them. Spiritual disciplines require just that: discipline and delayed gratification. We have to press through this because when we practice these spiritual disciplines we are creating spiritual deposits of God’s resources that we need to...

We have to confront the reality that when Jesus was born the spiritual realm was thrust into a great battle in the ongoing war between God and Satan. When Jesus came into the world, Spiritual warfare was at a pique. Yes, peace is coming, but peace has a cost—that cost is paid in battle! The birth of Christ was far more like God’s D-day invasion than an olive branch extended on a silent night.  Lis...

Did you realize that whenever you pray, you are acting as an Agent of Rebellion? The Christian worldview sees the world as enemy occupied territory. As you pray you come to realize that you are in the heart of that enemy occupied territory and you are part of the rebellion to take back the kingdom. You are a member of “the resistance” much like the French or Dutch underground against the Nazi’s in...

What does this forgiveness and turning the other cheek look like on a practical level? There is a tension in forgiveness that we need to understand. The tension is that it requires both the conjuring of the will AND the reliance on the supernatural power of God’s love flowing from our life.

Hebrews 9:22 says  “Without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness .” From Old Testament sacrifices to the death of Jesus on the cross, we see every sin is a trespass, a debt that must be paid for with  blood . Forgiveness is not cheap. It is painful. What does extending forgiveness look like? It looks like Jesus dying on the cross. It looks like me and you doing the same for those who “owe” us...

When you look at Jesus’ sacrifice- how big is the cross? The greater we have a view of God’s Holiness the greater a view we have of our own sinfulness. If you see how big your own sinfulness is you have a much bigger view of the cross. The power to forgive comes from being transformed by his forgiveness. After his denial Jesus asked Peter three times “ Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love m...

Today we are going to focus on the first truth about forgiveness- and that is there is No Forgiveness without Love- He loved you anyway! We examine this aspect of forgiveness by continuing to unpack The Lord's Prayer in conjunction with the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

In this episode of our Series on the Secret Life we examine praying in Secret through the postures modeled in the Lord’s Prayer. We find that Jesus is the source of our daily bread, both physical and spiritual, and we unlock the key to one of the hardest things we must do in our lives- Forgive.

After Jesus struggled with His face to the ground and finally relinquished his will to the Father, what happened? He got up off the ground  in strength  and faced the suffering, enduring it in continued strength. That is the same power that is available to us in the secret place when we first spend time in adoration and then in surrender with the “thy will be done prayer.”

One of the beloved Christmas stories is that of the Wise Men and their journey from the distant East to seek and worship the Messiah. What can we learn from these wise men? Did they just have a one-time encounter with God and then go home? I have my doubts. If this was truly a momentous occasion, a real encounter with the Messiah, I bet they went home and spread the good news… that a King who had...

As we await the celebration of the birth of our savior take a moment to examine not only how sweet this season is- but to look into the life of one of the Bible’s unsung heroes and what we can learn from him about how obedience is the highest expression of our LOVE for our Heavenly Father.

Everything in prayer life changes when we focus FIRST on just adoring God. Tell God how amazing, magnificent and wonderful he is. How you are blessed by the extravagance of His love. How he was  YOUR  Jesus and hero. And do you know why things change? It won't be because you are pumping up God’s ego and all of the sudden He says: “Well, they're is finally telling me how great I am- Now I am going...

Why does Jesus tell us to go pray in secret? Remember Jesus also says in Matthew 6: for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. So- Why go to our secret place and petition God if he already knows our petitions and our needs? The point is this-  Prayer doesn’t change God, it changes us.  The point of petition is not to pray fervently for what we want. It’s a time to allow God to work on...