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Holy Trinity Sunday
We are on a short vacation in Pensacola, FL with some great friends and our oldest son and daughter-in-law. When away from my church I love other church traditions. What a joy to be at a very old Episcopal Church on Holy Trinity Sunday. The liturgy was beautiful and the surroundings were gorgeous. The focus on the doctrine of the…
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The need to teach THINKING
We are a culture given to extremes. Rather than living in the balances of feasting and fasting, we go to the extremes of obesity and anorexia. That is not just concerning food. And we highlight the extremes in our culture, wildly cheering one side or wildly despairing over the other extreme. We don’t like the center. We need a discernment…
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Centering in on Success
7 “Be very brave and strong as you carefully obey all of the Instruction that Moses my servant commanded you. Don’t deviate even a bit from it, either to the right or left. Then you will have success wherever you go. 8 Never stop speaking about this Instruction scroll. Recite it day and night so you can carefully obey everything written in…
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The beauty of a jealous God
Deuteronomy 6 Obedience and fear are huge words and growing up they always sounded “demanding.” It’s only in the last few years that I’ve really come to understand them as loving and what God is calling Israel to is more like a marriage covenant than some list of demands. Obedience and fear are “demanding” in that there ARE rigors of…
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Today is enough
We have Wednesday night meals at our church during the school year to help people get to church without worrying about cooking a meal at home, or buying something on the way, and hurrying into church for Wednesday night ministries. Several years ago we had some families in a nearby apartment that would send their kids over for the meal……
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The small things we do
If we could possibly move away from doing things that we only think are good enough to post on Facebook, think of all the things we actually DO that bless people in the name of the Kingdom. When you think about all of us as believers simply living out the Kingdom in some small way… it is a huge payoff.…
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The need of the Church
The need of the Church is not some cleansing to make sure we have some very strict doctrinal stance memorized perfectly. Doctrine is important. Teaching is vital. Memorizing something to sound absolutely correct and then demanding that precision accuracy of everyone else is not healthy. The need of the Church is not beating our one issue social concern drums. Either…
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The call really is to live differently
I am working my way through Leviticus… intentionally… Leviticus 18-20 and 1 Peter 1 offer similar exhortations: Where you are headed and how you succeed depends on the relationship you have with God. Live differently. You do NOT have to live like the people in that land. What 1 Peter reminds us in a very sober way is that although we haven’t…
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Parenting and discsipleship
The internet has been around the entirety of raising three boys in our family, but I can’t imagine raising young kids in today’s environment. It’s entirely possible, of course! But the challenges! It is incredibly difficult to “train up a child” as a family, and then add in all the other sources of input flying at a kid every day.…
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Being set free from Egypt
The patterns, habits, bondages of the old life don’t easily go away. There are wonderful stories of addictions that instantly leave when people come to Christ, but more often than not it takes a little more time. Israel came out of slavery and still had a lot of Egypt in them. A few days (relatively speaking) out of Egypt and…
