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 May 21, 2015 | 0 comments
The Coast Redwood is the world’s tallest living organism, with the tallest towering 35 to 38 stories high. From a distance a tree that tall looks long and slender like a basketball player, but in fact the Coast Redwood is massive. At eye-level the trunk can be 27 feet in diameter, the length of two VW Beetles. Some of its branches are larger than the trunk of the largest oak. They are also among the...
Redwood Time and the Kingd...
Posted by Larry Eubanks on May 7, 2015 | 0 comments
Long before anyone ever came up with a word like “omnipresence”, humans believed that the gods lived “up there,” in the heavens. That’s right, before “Heaven” came to mean “the spiritual realm where the forgiven go to live in bliss forever” it simply meant “the sky and everything else up there.” It’s where the gods lived, because they sure didn’t live down here with the mortals. This is what the Hebrews...
The Hang-Around God
Posted by Larry Eubanks on May 5, 2015 | 0 comments
In Genesis 1, God made humans in his image and entrusted them with sovereignty over the rest of creation. This sovereignty over creation isn’t a despotic rule to do whatever we want with and to the earth, imposing our will on it. Have you ever tried to do that to a garden, forcing the soil to bend to your will? Doesn’t work too well, does it? I like fresh corn, but planting corn in December doesn’t work....
To Rule Over Creation
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Apr 28, 2015 | 0 comments
I came across the following on a website: God saves people; we don’t. God changes people; we don’t. God loves people; we do too. God honors people; we do too. God understands people; we try to. I think it’s good to understand the difference between what God can do and what we can do. We need to know the things we need to leave up to God, and the things in which we can emulate him. God saves people;...
How To Change Another Pers...
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Apr 23, 2015 | 0 comments
In Luke 4, Jesus begins his public ministry by going to synagogue and reading from the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (vs. 18-19 NIV) There is one...
Debt and the Good News
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Apr 20, 2015 | 0 comments
Everybody should know their place and keep their place. Including God. Right? One of the unfortunate effects of the Enlightenment worldview is that God was kicked upstairs (to borrow N.T. Wright’s wonderful phrase) and we don’t know how to handle it when he comes down and tries to enter into the conversation at the dinner table. It was Enlightenment philosophy that made a distinction between the sacred...
Abandoning Left/Right Thin...
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Apr 16, 2015 | 0 comments
My father grew up on a farm in south Mississippi, which means that he grew up growing what he ate, and that he ate things like turnip greens. Ugh. I grew up on Southern cooking, but it was my mother’s Southern cooking, not my father’s, and while she also grew up in south Mississippi, she grew up in the city. Biloxi, right on the Gulf, where they eat boiled shrimp, seafood gumbo, and fried oysters. If her...
Bugs, Boys, and the Wrath ...
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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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