Not only is this command underappreciated, it is vastly underapplied: Check out Luke 17:3-4 “If your brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them, and if they repent, forgive them. Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them.” I see at least three really difficult commands which are to guide our response to a fellow believer sinning against us. Let’s take a closer look at the first: 1) “Rebuke them.” This involves standing up for yourself and directly confronting this person who sinned…

You’ll be glad to know that I am successfully resisting the urge to write about politics tonight even though something I read on Twitter about an hour ago has my blood boiling.  Thus I have spared you an unhealthy dose of my righteous anger and some finger pointing and a whole mess of whataboutism. Maybe a sprinkle of virtue signaling, too. You will never know what you have missed! To be sure, I wanted to write about it, but I decided that if I indulged my (self) righteous anger here, nothing would have been gained except spreading that anger.  If…

“Turn the other cheek”, you’ll remember, is Jesus’s command specifically for believers who are harmed in some way by “an evil person” (Matthew 5:39).  But what if the person who harms us is not evil? What if the person who harms us is just a fellow believer? Maybe angry, or misguided, or ill-informed, but not evil? Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news: If the person who figuratively strikes my cheek is a brother or sister in Christ, I am not required to turn the other cheek. The bad news: I am required to do something…

When Paul says in I Timothy 1:15, “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the worst,” we can be confident that this is not just rhetoric.  Yes, Paul was a rhetorician in the sense that he was careful about how he stated his points and he expertly used rhetorical devices like analogies to explain his thoughts. But you don’t have to read too much of his writing to come to the conclusion that he was also a straight shooter.  He really understood himself to be…

In reality every person you know – every last person on this planet – is both a victim and a perpetrator of sin. The temptation, though, for every one of us is to play up instances of our victimhood while we downplay our own guilt in hurting others. We’re always the ones getting our cheeks slapped, never the ones slapping the cheeks of others. Sometimes we focus on the wrong others do to such an extent that our own sinfulness disappears in the periphery.  It’s a recipe for anger, self-righteousness and complaining.  We would do well to practice the opposite: put our…

We wrapped up our Myrtle Beach trip this morning, checked out a few minutes before 10 and hit the road. It was cold and dreary, and I was thankful – making it easier to leave.  After about 5 hours on the road, we re-evaluated our plans to spread the drive over two days and found that the four of us were unanimous in our desire to sleep in our own beds tonight.  So we pushed through, making it to our own front door by 11:00 pm after an uneventful day of travel.  The dogs were so excited to see us…

Conflict – I tell my language arts students – is what drives a story. In fact, it’s what drives life itself. And, in a fallen world, it is unfortunately a defining feature of human interaction. As I reach the halfway point of my spring break trip to Myrtle Beach, it strikes me that one of the main purposes of a vacation is to give a respite from all the day-to-day conflict in our lives.  Apart from vacation time, I have typically chosen “turn the other cheek” as my default response to conflict, both great and small. It has great appeal…