Anger is complicated. Even if we spend little time considering the anatomy of our anger, we all intuitively recognize its dangerous power (which, of course, is why we leverage it as we do). I deeply appreciate how the Bible carefully nuances this important issue.
Read MoreI once heard a pastor say that he’s never had to memorize scripture in his life because he has a photographic memory. That’s not very helpful for all of us non-photographic-memory-types. What about the rest of us who forget our mobile phone number or forget where we put our keys, let alone remember how Psalm 23 ends?
Read MoreEvery January there is a flurry of blog posts (like this one and this one) and encouragement to make a plan for your personal reading of the Bible (among other things) in the new year. That’s good. But, the reality is you may already be behind or too busy to come up with a plan. In fact, most of us are, which is why I’ve waited to post this until now.
Read More“The very humanity of Jesus Christ makes salvation possible, for here in the man Jesus, God comes alongside us as another man and within our historical existence with its temporal relations, choices, and decisions, He acts there upon us personally through word and love, through challenge and decision. God does not come to manipulate man, but to save him personally in personal reconciliation with the Father, and so He confronts man in such a way, that while He judges sin and exposes man’s heart with all its evil, He forgives him and draws out his heart in surrender and love to Himself. And yet in all that, God has come to be one with man, and to act from within man, and as man to yield to the Father in obedience of a true and faithful Son, and so to lay hold of God for us from the inside of man. It is within that union of the Son to the Father that the sinner is drawn, and given to share...it is the action of God as Man in Christ which delivers man from himself and draws him out in surrender to God. ”
I find it incredibly life-giving to regularly revisit the attributes of God (i.e. what God is like). Taken individually, they are stunning; taken together, they are breathtaking. Without knowing it, our fallen hearts often get derailed and we end up with a god that is very different than the God of the Scriptures.
Read MoreOur church recently spent three weeks walking through foundations of biblical marriage (and other related topics such as gender, headship, submission, etc). For many, it was the first time they've been exposed to biblical teaching on why God created marriage and what it means to be a husband and wife. While there are other resources available, the following is a list of those I have found to be the most helpful and accessible. I commend them to you for personal/group study.
Read More“Not only does he sustain this universe (as he once founded it) by his boundless might, regulate it by his wisdom, preserve it by his goodness, and especially rule mankind by his righteousness and judgment, bear with it in his mercy, watch over it by his protection; but also that no drop will be found either of wisdom and light, or of righteousness or power or rectitude, or of genuine truth, which does not flow from him, and of which he is not the cause...I call ‘piety’ that reverence joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces. For until men recognize that they owe everything to God, that they are nourished by his fatherly care, that he is the Author of their every good, that they should seek nothing beyond him - they will never yield him willing service. Nay, unless they establish their complete happiness in him, they will never give themselves truly and sincerely to him.”
“Pride in the religious sense is the arrogant refusal to let God be God. It is to grab God’s status for one’s self. In the vivid language of the Bible, pride is puffing yourself up in God’s face. Pride is turning down God’s invitation to join the dance of life as a creature in his garden and wishing instead to be the Creator, Independent, reliant on one’s own resources. Never does pride want to pray for strength, ask for grace, plead for mercy, or give thanks to God. Pride is the grand illusion, the fantasy of fantasies, the cosmic put-on.
The fantasy that we can make it as little gods leaves us empty at the center. Once we decide we have to make it on our own, we are attacked by the demons of fear and anxiety. We are worried that we cannot keep our balance as long as we carry no more inside our empty heart than what we can put there. We suspect that we lack the power to become what our pride makes us think we are. So we learn to swagger, to bluff, to use symbols to cover up our fears that we lack substance. We force other people to act as buttresses for the shaky ego that pride created by emptying our soul of God. In the words of God’s love song, we become arrogant.
Vanity is emptiness. A person who is empty at the center of life is vain, and a vain person is almost always arrogant. Every new situation calls forth the questions: ‘What can I get out of this to support the need of my ego for power and applause?’ As he encounters new people, he wonders, ‘How can this person contribute to my need for applause and power?’ He projects his own anxieties onto other people, so when others come to him he wonders, ‘What is this person’s pitch? What does he want from me?’ Life becomes a campaign to use people to support oneself and a constant battle to avoid having others use oneself that way. Vanity creates the need to use people because we cannot keep our balance spiritually if we are empty at the center.”
This Sunday (9/9) we’re starting a new sermon series through the book of Proverbs. We are all on a path. We are all on a journey. We are all heading somewhere. The question is, “What path are we on?” Proverbs reveals that our chosen path is a matter of life and death – and God wants life for us. He is a good God who cares deeply, not only about our future, but about how we live and navigate the tumultuous waters of life today. In our day of Twitter-sized updates, CNN sound-bites and ever-shifting popular opinion we need more than advise; we need wisdom from God. READ MORE…
“Reason has an intrinsic relationship to God, it has cosmic significance. Christians believe the rational world is the projection of a rational God who objectifies His eternal thoughts in the creation and who endows the human creature, the apex of His creation, with the image of God which includes a structure of reason similar to God’s own reason.”
“Preach the gospel, die, be forgotten.”
