The Hebrew word yada (“to know”) is, in fact, used for both sexual intercourse as well as our relationship with God. Every relational event is a stage that affords one a glimpse into the consumm...
Forgive us, O God, when we limit you – When we remake you in our image, When we claim our causes as your own, When we box you in, And explain you away, And in our attempts at understanding, whittle aw...
Romans 16:20 , Exodus 14:13-14 , Daniel 6:22-23, Romans 16:20, John 16:33, Psalm 46:10-11
On several occasions I have known the name of the victor before the end of the contest. Being a pastor, I’m often unable to watch the Sunday football games. While I am preaching, the teams are playing...
Genesis 1:1–3 , Exodus 20:1–17, Daniel 6:16–23, Luke 10:25–37, Romans 3:21–26, Psalm 119:105
In the sixteenth century the Reformers declared their total confidence in what they called the perspicuity of Scripture. What they meant by that technical term was the clarity of Scripture. They maint...
Martin Luther said that every Christian ought to read the Bible from cover to cover every year. But, likening the Bible to a forest, he also said that reading the Bible doesn’t become really enjoyable...
Genesis 22:1-14, Exodus 14:21-31, Micah 6:6-8, Matthew 22:36-40 , James 1:22-25, Psalm 119:105
Søren Kierkegaard offers two suggestions for the reader who tackles difficult portions of the Bible. First, read it like a love letter, he says. As you struggle with language, culture, and other barri...
My brother, who attended a Bible College during a smart-alecky phase in his life, enjoyed shocking groups of believers by sharing his “life verse.” After listening to others quote pious phrases from P...
Genesis 15:1-6, Exodus 14:10-14, Joshua 1:9, Psalm 23:, James 2:14-26
There’s no shortage of the religiously faithless who seem eager to tell us what faith is. Many of these characterizations of faith are reminiscent of Mark Twain’s precocious schoolboy who quipped, “Fa...
Preaching Commentary Context A Dire Warning All the way back in the Pentateuch God warned the people of Israel that their residency in the promised land was predicated upon their obedience to the ...
A number of mature Christians have described the Christian journey as one in which the follower of Jesus experiences different levels of grace. Let us imagine . . . that there are many rooms in t...
On this earth, then, in our deserts, God personally reveals and names himself. When he does so, his pleasure floods our senses, his beauty engulfs us, and our God-misconceptions are devastated. He mov...
Exodus 6:33, Exodus 20:3, Deuteronomy 6:5, 1 Corinthians 10:31, James 1:17, 1 Timothy 6:17, Luke 14:26-27, Philippians 3:8
We sometimes imagine surrender to God as emotional starvation. Every pleasure feels suspicious, and every passion feels in competition with our love of God. We think that the more miserable we are in ...
We must learn to see our limits as the entrance into the good life, not what bars us from it. But as we grow older, waiting feels like an inconvenience or affront. We take out our phones when we’re...
In this first-person memoir, Pastor Peter Chin shares a story that most pastors can probably relate to, the reality vs the expectation of a church-planter or even the pastor of an established church: ...
Exodus 3:11-12 , 1 Kings 19:9-13, Isaiah 42:1 , Matthew 3:16-17 , Luke 9:28-36, Psalm 22:1
Jesus needed, not once, but again and again at each stage of his mission and each crisis in his living and dying, a freshly confirmed knowledge of his own identity.
Context A Dire Warning All the way back in the Pentateuch God warned the people of Israel that their residency in the promised land was predicated upon their obedience to the Torah . This can be ...
Pastor: God not only provides us with armor to stand against the devil’s schemes, but once fitted for battle, He tells us to pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and request...
Lent 2024: Do This in Remembrance Remembering Deliverance AIM commentary Ancient lens What's the historical context? Covenant first These words spoken by God to the people of Israel...
Road Trips in Scripture While the definitions of “oceans” and “lakes” had to be qualified a bit in order to relate biblical locations to our present-day vacations, road trips—like mountains—can be fo...
Road Trips in Scripture While the definitions of “oceans” and “lakes” had to be qualified a bit in order to relate biblical locations to our present-day vacations, road trips—like mountains—can be fo...
Preaching Commentary Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? A Letter to Real People In the understanding of, and preaching on, any section of the Revelation of John , it is ...
Mark 9:2-9, Exodus 24:16-18, Daniel 7:9, 13-14, Revelation 1:14-15, Mark 1:11, Isaiah 53:null, Psalm 2:6-8, 2 Peter 1:17-18
Preaching Commentary Context The Gospel of Mark presents two clear phases of Jesus’ ministry. The first phase (chapters 1-8) takes place in Galilee. It is characterized by words and deeds of power ...
1 Samuel 3:1-20, Exodus 3:4, Genesis 22:1, Isaiah 6:8, 2 Kings 21:12, 2 Kings 19:3, Luke 17:2, Luke 2:12-26
Preaching Commentary The farther you go…the harder it is to return. The world has many edges and it’s easy to fall off. —Anderson Cooper, Dispatches From The Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and ...
The wonderful word master used to describe the person who is at the top of his or her craft, whatever the profession. It was a title that one could work toward and with some degree of confidence ascri...
I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent. Curiosity, obsession, and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas. Especially strong thinking powers (...
Peter Drucker suggests that we should always sustain two streams of learning and self-improvement. And though he is speaking specifically about work and career, what he says is equally applicable whet...
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather have these because we have acted rightly; these virtues are formed in man by d...
The point of discourse is to learn with and from one another. I used to tell my students that at least 20 percent of what I was telling them was wrong, but I didn't know which 20 percent it was: I...
Too many people hear the word capacity and assume it’s a limitation. They assume their capacity is set—especially if they’re beyond a certain age. People give up on the idea that their capacity or the...