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...
We cannot be true Christians without being original. Nothing gives us personality like prayer. Nothing makes man so original. To be creative, we must live with the Creator. Prayer places man in direct...
The most striking feature of the teaching of Jesus is that he was constantly talking about himself. It is true that he spoke much about the fatherhood of God and the kingdom of God. But then he added ...
The whole concept of the “image of God ” is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected. .. . And this gives [man] a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dignity. And we...
My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours... it is precisely through ...
Spiritual timekeeping is nourished by Jesus’s promise that the Spirit will guide us into all truth across time… This stands in contrast to what I’ll call the “primitivism” of so much American Christia...
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.
1 Corinthians 2:1-16, Matthew 5:13-20, Isaiah 6:1-13, Psalm 112:1-10
Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Relevant Background 1. The Purpose of Paul’s Letter 1 Corinthians is written to a local church with the purpose of reproof and cor...
Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Relevant Background 1. The Purpose of Paul’s Letter Recall that 1 Corinthians is written to a local church with the purpose of reproof...
Context Text Clues While all pericopes, of course, need to be read in context, sometimes we get clear textual clues that we are to do this. In this week’s text we get that by way of a bookended “fo...
Context Text Clues While all pericopes, of course, need to be read in context, sometimes we get clear textual clues that we are to do this. In this week’s text we get that by way of a bookended “fo...
What we need to realize, however, is that there is no such thing as autonomous or “self-grounding” knowledge. All systems of interpretation and all claims to true knowledge are ultimately grounded out...
I am created to do something or to be something for which no one else is created; I have a place in God’s counsels, in God’s world, which no one else has; . . . God knows me and calls me by my name.
Martin Heidegger said that being is presence. Whatever else this means, it suggests that in some way presence is a basic property of simply being. Everything that exists has presence by virtue of its ...
In his prose and poetry, David Whyte shares what David Brooks refers to as “emotional joy” in his book, While not necessarily unique to the Christian, this type of joy has the ability to draw us towar...
Luke 2:22-40, Leviticus 12:null, Exodus 13:1-16, Luke 2:47, Luke 2:51
Unexpected Circumstances Strange days, unexpected times: a belief-defying announcement of a pregnancy, a wearying journey to be taxed, an uncomfortable birthing bed in a hewn out cleft in the rock ...
How much curious and loving attention was expended by the first man who looked hard enough at the insides of trees, the entrails of cats, the hind ends of horses, and the juice of pine trees to realiz...
God is the eternal, independent, and self-existing Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is absolute dominion; the most pure, the...
Ephesians 2:10, Isaiah 64:8, 1 Peter 2:9, 2 Corinthians 3:2-3, John 17:18
When I think of masterpieces, I think of art. But what is art? I like the way that Thomas Hoving, who was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, put it: “Art happens when anyon...
In the darkness of a Herodian prison, John the Baptist seems to have had some doubts about his cousin, Jesus of Nazareth. The man who John had declared was so far beyond him that he was unworthy to ti...
Today I understand vocation quite differently—not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accept...
I’m reminded of something a rabbi said that stuck with me the past 20 years. This rabbi—she said how on the life journey we need to carry in our pockets two reminder notes. In one pocket the reminder...
Plenipotentiary Anyone know what a “plenipotentiary” is? Try that compound Latin word on for size! It is derived from the Latin words plenus “full” and potens “power.” It refers to a person who p...
Hebrews 13:8, Proverbs 8:22-31, Philippians 2:6-7, Luke 2:41-50, James 3:17
But the Wisdom of God, which is His only-begotten Son, being in all respects incapable of change or alteration, and every good quality in Him being essential, and such as cannot be changed and convert...
Nahum Sarna writes in Understanding Genesis: Perhaps nowhere is the contrast between the mythological and the Israelite conceptions more striking and more illuminating than in their respective descr...
The fire that burns and does not burn out, which has no tendency to destruction in its very energy, and is not consumed by its own activity, is surely a symbol of the One Being, whose being derives it...
John's Imprisonment, Jesus' Debut John the Baptist is as good as dead when we hear of Jesus’ splash onto the Galilean landscape in Mark 1:14. Mark tells us that Jesus arrives in Galilee preac...
Galatians 1:10, Philippians 2:3-4, Matthew 23:1-12, 2 Thessalonians 1:11-12, James 4:1-10, 1 Peter 5:1-11
All of us struggle with our own desires for accomplishment and ambition. Christians especially find it difficult to discern their own worldly ambitions vs. following Jesus’ comand to seek first the ki...
Ephesians 2:20, Isaiah 28:16, 1 Peter 2:6-8, 1 Corinthians 3:11, Hebrews 12:27-28, Psalm 118:22, Matthew 21:42, Mark 12:10-11, Luke 20:17
The cornerstone was a critical element of ancient architecture, the anchor that the rest of the building relied on. The cornerstone was the stone that set the alignment of the entire building. Every o...