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Sculpting God in our Image
The temptation to sculpt God according to our expectations and presuppositions, to make this God much like another, is strong with us. You see it all down through history: in the Middle Ages it seemed... -
liturgy
Holy and just Lord, we come before you today guilty
Holy and just Lord, we come before you today guilty. Guilty of reducing Jesus in our minds and hearts. At times we make him our personal savior, forgetting that his love and mercy are for all tongues,... -
lectionary
Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany
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 ... -
scripture guide
Scripture Guide, Exodus 34:29-35
Between God and God's People This passage is often linked with the Transfiguration of Jesus and is included with lectionary passages related to it. It is part of a constellation of texts which ra... -
lectionary
Transfiguration Sunday
Between God and God's People This whole Sunday’s worth of texts is about the relationship of God to God’s people. In what way has God been present among us in the past? How is God present... -
illustration
What You Think About God Determines Your Life
Put another way, what you think about God will shape your destiny in life. If you think of God as homophobic, racist, and mad at the world, this distorted vision of reality will shape you into a relig... -
lectionary
Transfiguration Sunday
AIM Commentary Ancient Lens What’s the historical context? Mixed Loyalties Diving straight into 2 Corinthians 4:3-6 without giving a nod to 2 Corinthians 3:1-4:2 gives a strange impression, bec... -
scripture guide
Scripture Guide, Isaiah 40:21-31
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 ... -
scripture guide
Scripture Guide, Isaiah 6:1-8
Context Prophecy: Not Just Future-Telling When confronted with the question of the purpose of the prophetic books in the Old Testament, it is commonly supposed that their primary purpose is future t... -
lectionary
Trinity Sunday
Context Prophecy: Not Just Future-Telling When confronted with the question of the purpose of the prophetic books in the Old Testament, it is commonly supposed that their primary purpose is future t... -
illustration
The Two Surveys
My friend Scot McKnight is a New Testament professor in Chicago. For years, he taught a class on Jesus, and he would start every semester with two surveys. The first was a set of questions about the s... -
illustration
Creation is an Act of Self-Limitation
Every creator, from a child with Play-Doh to Michelangelo, learns that creation involves a kind of self-limiting. You produce something that did not exist before, yes, but only by ruling out other opt... -
illustration
Building for Glory and Good
I love watching young boys and girls build things with Legos. Their small, creative masterpieces cannot help but reflect their image-bearing nature and remind us we were all made to make things. When ... -
Quote
An important aspect of being an image bearer of God is to work and to create value by serving others within our collaborative economic system. -
illustration
Reducing God to Manageable Terms
A. W. Tozer once wrote, Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get Him where we can use Him, or at least know where He is when we need Him. We want a ... -
Quote
No one image or model, however elusive or rich, can do more than offer glimpses and hints toward the divine. -
liturgy
Forgive us, O God, when we limit you
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... -
scripture guide
Scripture Guide, Psalm 19 (Guide A)
Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? The Books of the Psalms and David The Book of Psalms is divided into five books, like the five books of the Torah. While it is not obvi... -
lectionary
Transfiguration Sunday
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 ... -
Quote
Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols. -
illustration
Shadowed by the Illusory Person
Thomas Merton once said, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self, This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. A... -
illustration
Transferring Our Hope
Idols are dangerous when a worshiper, having lost patience in God, transfers his hope and joy into a deity represented by a handmade thing and cries to it: “Awake and arise!” In this move, human antic... -
scripture guide
Scripture Guide, Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14 and Psalm 93
God's Sovereignty The sovereignty of God is a pervasive theme in the Bible, expressed in a variety of ways. Daniel’s vision is one of those expressions and a bit more challenging than the declara... -
illustration
Feed My Sheep
Sometimes, of course, the sense of God with us becomes much more distinct. My oldest brother, J. I. Willard, served for over thirty years as a minister under the blessing of God. But his entry into th... -
illustration
A Consuming Fire
“Holy, holy, holy.” What are they saying? Have you ever wondered that? What does that mean? Many people have tried to understand what God’s holiness means. Some describe it as his perfect morality. Go... -
illustration
The Glory of Man & the Glory of God
What resonance does the word glory have in today’s English language? How often is it used, and with what meaning? The adjective glorious is familiar enough—we might say that we saw a “glorious” sunset... -
illustration
Bright Spark, Shot from a Higher Place
Thus the incomparable George Herbert writes of our glorification in his poem “The Star”: Bright spark, shot from a brighter place, Where beams surround my Saviour’s face, Canst thou be any where ... -
lectionary
Second Sunday after the Epiphany
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 ... -
illustration
Don’t be a Bad Commercial for God!
I once heard a sermon that compared believers to commercials for God. “And God doesn’t need any bad commercials,” I remember the preacher saying. It stuck with me, and from then on I often made decisi... -
illustration
A People is Made by Making
The Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his book The Home We Build Together , points out to the reader that in scripture the description of the creation of the universe in Genesis is given a mere thirty-fou...
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