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 situation on this Holy Weekend and so I offer it to you, with the necessary alterations, to help you in your preparation for Resurrection Day. In the Christian calendar, the Thursday of Holy Week is...
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 for the living among the dead? He isn’t here, but has been raised.” It’s difficult, therefore, to read the Passion–the betrayal, the arrest, the beating, the mocking, the...
The Relevant Temptation
The other day our son Austin asked Pam and me if we had ever gone through anything like the COVID-19 pandemic before. The answer, of course, was no. These are unprecedented times. People are fearful, anxious. Angry. Some are complacent. Some are in denial. We are isolating ourselves from each other. If ever we needed a word from God, it is now. As one who weekly speaks to people about God, on behalf of God, and maybe, every once in awhile, delivers a word from God, I feel the weight of that need to hear...
You Don’t Learn Wisdom From a Book Like Proverbs
Let’s talk about the Book of Proverbs. Hey, wait, where are you going? Get back here! Sheesh, hear me out for a second. I know it doesn’t sound very exciting, but hang on, I’m gonna bring on the excitement in a minute. Well, no, probably not, but hang with me for a second anyway. The Book of Proverbs has been called “God’s Instruction Book for Life,” which sounds awesome. Not content with that pithy title, another person said, “Proverbs is actually a book of instructions on how to live a life pleasing...
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Mar 6, 2016 | 0 comments
This is my message given on March 6, 2016 We have had a great response to the Journey of Spiritual Renewal. We have heard testimony after testimony of people who experienced spiritual healing, or spiritual breakthroughs, or people who have challenged to deeper prayer and greater acts of service. Reading the testimonies of service has been wonderful, and there were some things on the list of suggestions...
How To Sustain Spiritual G...
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Mar 2, 2016 | 0 comments
Jesus said, quite straightforwardly, “Do not judge, so that you will not be judged.” (Matthew 7:1) Darn! We like the last part—I mean, who likes to be judged?—but judging others is so…satisfying. Maybe even fun. Certainly natural. It comes so easily to all of us. But that first part. There must be some way where we can still get away with judging others without being judged ourselves. Fortunately...
Do Not Judge: What Did Jes...
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Feb 26, 2016 | 2 comments
The theme of the book of Joshua could be stated as, “Show no mercy.” When the walls of Jericho came a tumbling’ down, the Israelites “devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.” (Joshua 6:21) No mercy. Then they moved on to the small, lightly-populated village of Ai, and were soundly defeated. Turns out that one of the...
“No Mercy” No ...
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Feb 23, 2016 | 2 comments
There is little about the 4th Beatitude—“Blessed are those that hunger and thirst for righteousness”—that we get right. Let’s start with our concept of “righteousness.” We have made it a general term for “sinlessness.” “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). This is the verse I was told to memorize to convince people that they were in fact sinners. Which, curiously, I never needed to do; no...
Hunger and Thirst for Just...
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Feb 15, 2016 | 0 comments
Nobody likes to be called meek. In a culture that values the assertive, the decisive, and the forceful, meek seems weak. Weak is indeed what we think of when we think of meekness, but there is a big difference between the two. Weakness is lacking power. It’s wanting to do something but unable to pull it off. Meekness, on the other hand, is having the power to do something, but lacking the will to do it....
The Power of Meek
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Feb 4, 2016 | 0 comments
When Job lost everything—his children, his livestock, his wealth, his health, literally everything—his wife comforted him by telling him to curse God and die. Yay marriage! Then his best friends told him not to curse God, because it wasn’t God’s fault at all. It was Job’s fault. He must have done something wrong, and though they didn’t know what it was, surely Job did. This type of calamity doesn’t happen...
Mourning Comfort
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Jan 17, 2016 | 0 comments
The Beatitudes are not prescriptions on how to be blessed. “I need to be poor in spirit (or just plain poor) so I can be blessed,” misses the point and leads to some interesting interpretations of how to live the spiritual life, and can sometimes lead us away from properly understanding what Jesus is getting at. It can even help us to explain away the more radical aspects of the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes...
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I am a lifelong student of the Bible, and have been a pastor for over twenty-five years. My desire through this blog is to help people see things in the intersection of Scripture and real life that they might have missed. The careless handling of the Bible is causing a lot of problems in our churches and our culture--and is literally turning people away from the church, and, sometimes, God. I hope to treat Scripture with the respect it deserves, and, even if you don't agree with what I say, give you some insight.
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