I’ve had the hymn, “‘Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus” on my mind today. There are a couple things I love about it. One, it speaks of the restful, abiding relationship we have in Christ. He is the vine, we are the branches. We need only live in Him and draw from Him (John…
Category: New Testament
No Greater Love
Image from The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004) In the garden of Gethsemane, tears and bloody sweat dripped from Jesus’s face. He was praying hard, asking if there was any way out of the cross: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as…
Fact & Fiction
The fiction: Trying circumstances, instability within or without, personal failure, weakness, a lack of spiritual discipline, temptation, and the devil can separate us from God. The fact: “Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Can affliction or anguish or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: Because of You we are being put…
Jesus Done Got Hitched
Comic by Chan Lowe So maybe you heard: Some scholar says Jesus may have had a wife. I won’t bore you by rehashing a debate that amounts to nothing. You can read about it yourself if you want. Big, fat zero or not, I felt annoyed when I first read about it. Once again, non-Christians are…
Hard Pressed but Not Crushed
But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also…
The Only Truth I Know
Simon & Garfunkel “I stand alone without beliefs. The only truth I know is you.” —Paul Simon, “Kathy’s Song” Paul Simon wrote the above lyric for a woman. “Kathy’s Song” is a love song par excellance. Yet every time I hear this line from the song, I cannot help but think of the Lord. Over…
The Seventh Day
“God Resting on the Seventh Day” (19th Century German Engraving) This is the account of the heavens and the earth in the day when they were created. Pilate handed him over to them to be crucified. Carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the skull (which in Aramaic is called Golgotha),…
Mosaics, Quilts, and Piles of Socks
What should church “look like?” How should we “do church?” I hear these and similar questions bandied about regularly. There are lots of different answers. Some say we should “do church” like they did in the New Testament. In reality, there was no single New Testament way of “doing church.” There was a mosaic of…
The Myth of Heaven (?)
Our Pastor is preaching through 1 Corinthians. Today we started chapter 15. Paul is dealing with a Corinthian coterie that says there is no resurrection (1 Cor. 15:12). It’s possible this was a group of Gnostics. Gnostics said the body was meaningless. It was only a house of corruption imprisoning the spirit. Bodily resurrection would…
The Voice of One 