I don’t know that I have ever stepped back from the gospel stories so as to consider that those first disciples attached themselves to Jesus assuming that he was potentially a great rabbi, but not really suspecting He was anything more than that.  They certainly didn’t assume they were walking alongside the Son of God. Not at first. They likely were thinking no more than “Here is a man who can teach me about God.” It was only over time that the thought started to dawn on them, very slowly, “Wait a minute – This IS God!” I think pastors…

Enoch is a fascinating mystery of the Old Testament. He is introduced in Genesis 5:18 and his story is wrapped up by 5:24. His main defining character attribute seems to be that he “walked with God”. Among the scarce details we are given is who his father was (Jared), who his son was (Methuselah), and that he lived a total of 365 years. And THEN, we are told rather cryptically, Enoch “was no more” BECAUSE God “took him away”.  This is highly unusual, to say the least. Only one other character in the Old Testament skips the whole death ordeal:…

“Christians are starving for serious biblical content, not the basics of the faith with adult illustrations. If pastors don’t preach and teach the text, they don’t provide a template for how to study Scripture. If you can’t retrace your pastor’s sermon in the biblical text after Sunday, you may need to find a mentor somewhere else.” Michael S. Heiser, Brief Insights on Mastering Bible Study, Chapter 26 One of the main weaknesses of the topical preaching found in so many pulpits (not to mention the topical teaching in most group study curriculum) is that it rarely sets a biblical passage…

Tonight I am left reflecting on a particularly pleasant evening with friends.  Kate and Storly are the ones who introduced Haiti to Melissa and me back in 2010, turning our lives upside down for the following decade. For this I will be forever grateful. These days – 14 years later – we live just a couple of miles apart in this town of Columbus, Indiana, allowing us to stay in regular contact. Our youngest works side by side with their youngest at the local ice cream parlor. Kate and Melissa get together sometimes for coffee. Storly and I get together…

In the course of my weirdest hobby – consuming YouTube debates over Calvinist doctrines – I recently came across a young YouTuber who wears his Calvinist doctrine like a badge of honor. I mean, even more than your average Calvinist does. His videos frustrated me. Although he often came across as incredibly intelligent, he made really poor arguments in favor of the 5 points of “TULIP” and seemed incapable of fully grasping his opponents’ perspectives. His temper would flare on occasion and he would fling politically incorrect slurs at his challengers.  I sometimes engaged him in the comments section of…

The YouTube algorithm served me up a video offering a refutation of Hell as eternal conscious torment. The presenter was a pastor named Daniel Wilson who has about 550 subscribers – I don’t know anything else about him, but I thought he made a decent and concise argument. What really caught my attention, though, was a thought-provoking analogy Wilson used to answer a question I have had for years: What is the difference between our soul and our spirit?  Are those terms synonymous or do they indicate two different aspects of human existence? If they are different, in what way…

How often do you come across a verse in the Bible and you know you’ve read it before but this time around it strikes you as unusually profound or challenging or beautiful?  And then you think, “How did I overlook this before?” Here’s a verse in Proverbs that I used to close my sermon this morning. It is a simple and beautiful image, especially when you consider that Jesus described Himself as “the Way”:  The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. (4:18)

I recently came across a quote from Dallas Willard which I thought might be relevant to my dissertation project about habit formation and spiritual disciplines: “Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting.”  Although it was credited as coming from his book The Divine Conspiracy, no page number was cited. So I checked it out on Amazon, read a sample, and thought it might be worth buying – so I did. The book has me intrigued so far and might prove to be useful to me beyond my project. In assessing the current weakness (as of 1997)…

It is Dr. Tim Mackie – who knows his Hebrew – who defines the word “righteousness” as “right relationship”. But he points out that the “rightness” for a relationship will differ one to another. A right relationship with your own child is going to have very different entailments than a right relationship with your boss. You might be able to rank the importance of your various relationships. Perhaps a spouse would rank at the top and children just below that, followed by parents or siblings and then relatively distantly by a friend, a boss, a co-worker, and all the way…