Thought Exercise on Ancestors

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The Sabbath for the Descendants of Slaves

Author

Keywords

People think the sabbath is antiquated; I think it will save us for ourselves… When we rest, we do so in memory of rest denied. We receive what has been withheld from ourselves and our ancestors. And...

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Identity and Work

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

Is your last name Smith, Miller, Cooper, or Baker? Many surnames have their origin in the trades that your ancestors were identified with. Today, especially with the rise of the “gig economy,” people ...

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A Christian Alzheimer’s Disease

Author

Sandra L. Richter

Keywords

Two-thirds of the story of redemption is known to Christians as the Old Testament. Yet in the decades that I have been teaching Bible, I have found that most Christians, if allowed to answer honestly,...

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The Ancestry of Jesus

Author

Nancy Guthrie

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 1:1-6, Luke 5:31-32, Matthew 9:12-13, Matthew 5:3, Galatians 3:26-28

We find hope in the ancestry of Jesus that no matter what we’ve done or where we come from, we too can be included in Jesus’ family. Jesus does not look for people who are perfect and have never faile...

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Where do Humans Come From?

Author

Source Unknown

Keywords

We all know children sometimes ask difficult questions. One day a young girl asked her parents where human beings come from. “Well,” the mother said, “God created Adam and Eve and Adam and Eve had chi...

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Decended from Royalty

Author

James Merritt

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 1:

The actress Brooke Shields has quite an impressive family mosaic. Hanging from her family tree are the likes of Charlemagne, El Cid, William the Conqueror, the royal houses of virtually every European...

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Patrilineal & Patrilocal Life in Ancient Israel

Author

Sandra L. Richter

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 35:, Genesis 36:, Numbers 26:33, Numbers 27:1-11, Numbers 36:1-12, Joshua 17:3-6, Matthew 1:

The term patrilineal has to do with tracing ancestral descent (and therefore tribal affiliation and inheritance) through the male line. In Israel the possessions of a particular lineage were carefully...

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Story as Worldview and the Example of Passover

Author

N. T. Wright and Michael Bird

Keywords

Stories, after all, are one of the most basic modes of human life and are a characteristic expression of worldview. Human life is constituted by a series of stories, implicit and explicit, that makes ...

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His Tree, My Tree

Author

James Merritt

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 1:1-17

Every year at Christmastime, the world looks back two thousand years to the birth of a baby. But for more than four thousand years, people living on the other side of that birth looked forward to the ...

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The Dayenu: It Would Have Been Enough

Author

Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.

Keywords

For millennia Jews have celebrated Passover to commemorate God’s rescue of their ancestors from slavery in Egypt. Passover begins with the Seder, a ritual feast. In its liturgy is the Dayenu, which me...

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Tech is Too Easy

Author

Andy Crouch

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 11:1-9 , Exodus 32:1-6 , Ecclesiastes 1:9-10, Matthew 6:19-21 , Romans 1:21-25, Psalm 115:4-8

Now, technology is everywhere. I don’t mean just glowing screens and digital devices; I mean the whole apparatus of “easy everywhere” that has come into existence in just over the span of one human li...

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Christian Geese

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 40:31, Romans 13:11, 1 Corinthians 3:1-3, Galatians 4:9, Hebrews 5:12; 12:1, 1 Peter 2:9

The Danish philosopher and contrarian Soren Kierkegaard once compared Christians of his time to a flock of geese in a barnyard. Every week, they listened to an eloquent speaker who recounted the stori...

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The Creation of Artificial Time

Author

John Mark Comer

Keywords

The Passing of Time

We all know our world has sped up to a frenetic pace. We feel it in our bones, not to mention on the freeway. But it hasn’t always been this way. Let me nerd out on you for a few minutes just to show...

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The Secret to Happiness Among the Famous

Author

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Keywords

We’ve all seen and loved the movies about the young underdog becoming a star. I won’t claim to be 100 percent immune to it. In fact, I think there’s something natural about wanting to be famous, in te...

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Defining Home

Author

Jen Pollock Michel

Keywords

Scripture

Ephesians 2:19-22, John 14:2-3, Hebrews 11:13-16, 2 Corinthians 5:1, Psalm 23:6, Revelation 21:3

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel focuses on etymology of home in v...

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Memories and Trauma Can be Inherited

Author

Casey K. Tygrett

Keywords

Scripture

Deuteronomy 6:20-23, Exodus 12:26-27, Joel 1:3, Psalm 78:4-7, Romans 5:12

Some stories, however, have been handed down to us. For some, we were not yet cognizant, and for others, we weren’t even born when experiences, memories, and stories affected our family and communitie...

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The Patterns of Our Achievements

Author

Malcolm Gladwell

Keywords

Achievement

Scripture

Isaiah 51:1-2, Colossians 3:16, Psalm 78:4-6, Proverbs 22:6, Acts 17:26, Deuteronomy 6:6-7, 2 Timothy 1:5

People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all themselves. But in fact they are invariably the benefici...

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Our Overstory and Understory

Author

Mark Batterson

Keywords

In the world of ecology, the tallest trees in a forest form a canopy that is called the overstory. It provides shade for the understory—all the vegetation that grows beneath the uppermost layer of fol...

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Some very Old Footsteps

Author

Mark Buchanan

Keywords

Walking

In 1976, in Laetoli, Tanzania, Africa, Mary Leakey and her team of paleontologists stumbled—that’s the word the Smithsonian uses—upon animal tracks that, two years later, led to the discovery of two p...

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Bearing the Family Likeness

Author

Vaughan Roberts

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 1:27

The anthropologist Desmond Morris has written: ‘Human beings are animals. They are sometimes monsters, sometimes magnificent, but always animals.’ That statement is correct as far as it goes. We are c...

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Dust and Creation

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 2:null, Genesis 1:30

Contrast the creation of the first man according to Genesis 2 with the creation of the first human beings according to Mesopotamian tradition. Both start with dust or clay, but then the accounts vary....

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Forgetting Death

Author

Keywords

Death

According to Greek mythology, people once knew in advance their exact day of death. Everyone on earth lived with a deep sense of melancholy, for mortality hung like a sword suspended above them. All t...

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The Value of Origins

Author

Jen Wilkin

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 1:27, Isaiah 64:8, Jeremiah 1:5, Psalm 139:13-14, Ephesians 2:10, 1 Peter 2:9

Origins matter to humans. The Antiques Roadshow has held the interest of its viewers for over thirty-five years with a simple formula of determining the origins of items people have not properly...

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Created from the Same Dust

Author

Henri J. M. Nouwen

Keywords

Dust

Across all barriers of land and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same laws, and destined for the same end. With this compas...

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The End of Human History

Author

G. K. Chesterton

Keywords

Jesus

Scripture

Matthew 27:57-60, John 19:41-42, Luke 23:50-56, Romans 6:4, Colossians 2:14-15, Isaiah 53:9-11, 1 Corinthians 15:20-22

They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden the Romans setting a military guard lest there...

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Our Stories, Incarnated by God

Author

Casey K. Tygrett

Keywords

Scripture

1 Corinthians 11:26, Romans 6:3-4, 2 Corinthians 3:2-3, Revelation 12:11, Colossians 2:11-12

Every person in Scripture lived out a personal story incarnated by an even greater story about God, life, and the world. That story came from the politics, theology, and culture ingrained in their mem...

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Cultivating Responsibility Towards the Future

Author

David R. Carlin, Jr.

Keywords

Ironically, the best way to develop an attitude of responsibility toward the future is to cultivate a sense of responsibility toward the past. … We are born into a world that we didn’t make, and it is...

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Just a stain in the soil

Author

William Rowley

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 3:19, Ecclesiastes 3:20, Genesis 18:27, James 4:14, Psalm 90:12, Psalm 39:4, 1 Peter 2:24-25, Psalm 90:10, Psalm 78:39, 1 Chronicles 29:15, Psalm 39:5, Psalm 144:4, Job 14:1, Psalm 103:15-16, Job 7:6-7, Genesis 2:7

I love a British TV show called Time Team. Hosted by Tony Robinson, a team of archeologists descend on a site in Britain and excavate for three days. Inevitably, the archeologists unearth the dead...

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Eden a Temple, Adam a Priest

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 1:null, Genesis 2:null

John Walton, in The Lost World of Adam and Eve, argues that the Garden of Eden should be seen as a sacred space (a kind of "Holy of Holies") set off from the rest of creation, with the seven...

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The “Estate”

Author

Andrew J. Bauman

Keywords

Lifelong family friends own more than a thousand acres of land deep in Southern Mississippi, which they refer to as “the estate.” There isn’t a holiday get-together that passes without the family meet...

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