On walking the Way

We live in a world where the noise and the pressure of everyday life can be deafening often threatening to drown out the voice of God. I think it is one of the reasons so many in the modern world question if God even exists. We are immersed in our own creations and in a constant hurry. When we are not rushing around, we are too exhausted to think, and in the back of our minds, or maybe in the fron...

Gen 17:1 When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “ I am God Almighty ; walk before me, and be blameless, Rev 1:8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God , “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty .” In a world where references to God are commonly used as profanity or empty expressions of surprise, I guess it follows that the impact of...

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. [Matt 5:5 ESV] In teaching the bible over the last 20 years or so the same two mistakes keep popping up over and over again. They manifest themselves in various ways depending on the passage but they are the same mistakes. * Interpreting a figurative passage as literal. * Interpreting a literal passage as figurative. To be fair it is not alw...

The world we live in often leaves us feeling harassed and anxious, it can leave us feeling desperate to take control of our lives and bring them into order. I feel like this a lot. Many times the chaos in my life is my own doing, and I often need to stop and reflect and ask myself about my priorities. But sometimes, maybe more often than I am comfortable with, these interruptions have another sour...

This week, we are going to spend a bit of time with one of the oldest stories there is. The story of mankind’s descent into sin. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In this new year, let’s start at the beginning and take a fresh look at what drives us to do the things we do. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the wo...

The New year always brings with it a sort of implicit hope. Hope that this year might be better than the last. A hope for relief - a hope for change. I think this is a good thing, even though it may in reality be nothing more that a conditioned cultural response after all without a calendar one day is no different than the next. But in spite of this I think we all agree that every day is a new day...

I woke up the other night thinking about this simple thought, Jesus is with me. Now I know that a thought like that does not exactly break new ground in theology or dazzle anyone with its genius, but maybe it should. As I laid there thinking about that I realized that all I was doing was thinking about that, I was thinking about the idea of Jesus being with me. I was not experiencing the presence...

I suppose there are many that feel this time of year is a time of empty sentiment, or possibly a form of harmless escapism. A time where we dream of “peace on earth and good will toward men”, and wish each other a “Merry Christmas” or even “Happy Holidays”. But to most, and I fear even many Christians, the hope of Christmas has become so abstract and distant that it has more in common with a pleas...

Reality it seems, is never quite what we expect. Sometimes it’s better and sometimes it’s worse, but very often it’s an odd mixture of both. It seems even the coming of the Messiah, with all of Israel’s hopes and expectations over the years, did not arrive as purely good news. It was at the same time the best news ever, and a sign that will be opposed. It will be the inauguration of salvation for...

I have taught a lot of people how to study and teach the bible inductively over the last 20 years or so. But among my students and staff I have seen a pattern in their questions and once I noticed it I started seeing it in peoples questions everywhere. It seems that we as human beings always want to find the thing that nobody else has seen, that secret knowledge that will make everything else make...

When I was young it was trendy to make a hard separation between Christianity and “religion”. Religion was some thing that was old, cold, and man-made at its best, and at its worst it was down right idolatrous. We would revel in the stories of Jesus taking apart the Pharisees for honoring their tradition over truth. But as I have gotten older I have learned there is an important difference between...

Happy Thanksgiving! If there was ever a time when we need a holiday like Thanksgiving it is now. Have you ever stopped to think of how many blessings we have just by virtue of living in the modern age? But no matter how we improve things the happiness of our souls seems to be almost completely disconnected from our technical advances and circumstances. Thanksgiving is a genius holiday, because if...

Today we are going to look at a side of Jesus that is often overlooked. Too often Jesus is portrayed in modern culture as the ultimate in inclusiveness and openness. In the more extreme modern teachings Jesus has been re-imagined (as if that can be done to an actual historical person) to be more like an emotional comfort animal than our Lord. In fact, “lord” is a word that has almost fallen out of...

Christianity has always been counter-cultural. But in current usage, the term counter-cultural more often than not, describes something the individual chooses to do for their benefit or cause by fighting the cultural norms, sometimes violently. The cross was and is extremely counter-cultural but in a very different way. Today’s passage shockingly describes what it looks like to be counter-cultural...

We pick up this week, where we left off last week in Peter’s first letter. This week Peter gets down to business and begins to instruct his readers how to live in a world governed by Roman emperors and governors. Imagine living under Roman rule and you are a servant or slave, a situation that was as likely as not for the original readers of this letter. In fact nearly all of Peter’s original audie...

The Church throughout its history had various takes on politics and citizenship. It has at various times been deeply political(often to its own harm) and at other times refusing to even discuss politics. This second group represented the attitude of the church I was raised in. Through the years since my childhood however I have been involved with many churches in many countries as a missionary, an...

This week we are going to look at a parable that is often used, somewhat out of context, to teach about money. That is not to say that this story can not be used to teach on other subjects, it is just that taking a parable out of its original context will not give you the meaning that was intended when Jesus told the story. This parable is included with the other parables we have been looking at b...

Today we are continuing on from last weeks passage to look at a very famous but not always easy to interpret parable of Jesus regarding how we should live as we wait for his return. Remember, we are still in the context of answering the disciples questions regarding the destruction of the temple and the coming of the Son of Man . “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their...

Today I am going to get a bit more technical than usual since a lot has been written and said about the second coming over the years. I would like to slow down a bit and really look at this passage and its context to see what it says and also what it does not say. But don’t give up, before I finish I will bring this back to walking the way of Jesus. “But concerning that day and hour no one knows,...

Whenever times get difficult and uncertain enough to generate fear it seems that people start talking about the return of Jesus, or at least what people now call the “apocalypse” (though that word has in recent years come to mean something completely foreign to its original meaning in biblical literature). Our current days are fearful and very uncertain. To those that are a bit older it often feel...

So far, we have been discussing the nature of love , the foundational necessity of love, and the characteristics of love . But in this last episode(for now) on love I want to get down to the reality of love. Love is not something you think about and discuss, love is something you do for others. So I want to begin with a very famous story. But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And wh...

We have been looking at love in recent weeks. We have seen how love is neither trivial or necessary (in the deterministic sense), and is in fact absolutely foundational to knowing God . We have been using a working definition of love which is based on the love that God has shown to us through the cross of Jesus. We have said that love is, “benefiting others at my expense”. This is sometimes called...

In previous articles I have talked about faith and works and how as modern people we tend to want to separate things into neat little piles that do not touch, including faith and works. Theologians are also guilty of this notion at times as they strive for the ultimate systematic theology. Analysis is good, but you need to know when to stop. Because there are topics that break if you try to comple...

Imagine a world where everything happens just as it must. No choices, nothing but the necessity of existence. Each piece playing its part no more, no less. Complete harmony of motion, nothing out of place. John Lennon wrote the song Imagine about a world like this(though I doubt he realized what he was suggesting). And people ask all the time, “If there is a God, why didn’t He create the world wit...

“ Lord, if you will, you can make me clean. ” And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “ I will; be clean .” And immediately the leprosy left him. And he charged him to tell no one , but “go and show yourself to the priest, and make an offering for your cleansing, as Moses commanded, for a proof to them.” But now even more the report about him went abroad, and great crowds gathere...