A Prayer to Prepare for Easter

This is a guest post from my good friend and colleague Dr. Randy Millwood, Church Services Consultant for the Maryland/Delaware Baptist Convention, FBC Frederick member, and best Real-Beard Santa Claus in the world. He wrote it as an email to the ministers of BCMD for Maundy Thursday, but it speaks to our...

A Maundy Thursday Prayer (Psalm 88)

Despair is difficult when the Resurrection hovers nearby. For two millennia the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection have been told and retold, celebrated and feted. Everyone knows how the story ends. It doesn’t end with “It is finished.” Rather, with “”Why do you look...

If Jesus was Non-Violent, Why Did He Tell His Disciples to Buy Swords?

There are a few—and just a few—New Testament passages that people like to use to buttress their argument that Jesus was not really non-violent but in fact at the very least accepted violence in certain circumstances. I don’t know why people feel the need to do so, but they do, so let’s have a look at one of...

If An Evil Person Does a Good Thing, Is It Good or Evil?

“Whoever is not with me is against me.” “Whoever is not against us is for us.” Jesus made both of these statements, and they aren’t different ways of saying the same thing. The first, from Matthew 12:20, restricts the number of people who are for Jesus to those who are with him. If you aren’t specifically...

Good and Evil and the Untrained Eye

In Matthew 13 Jesus tells a parable about a man with a wheat field. During the night, some guy with a really, really bad attitude snuck in and sowed some weeds among the wheat. Which is interesting because weeds are the kind of things that don’t need sowing. They just appear. But these aren’t ordinary...

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