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 Nov 9, 2017 | 0 comments
In his book, Chase the Lion, Mark Batterson writes, Shortly after being installed as the twentieth pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a sermon in November of 1954 titled “Transformed Nonconformist.” “The Christian is called upon not to be like a thermometer conforming to the temperature of his society,” said King, “but he must be like a...
Racism and the Lord’...
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Oct 17, 2017 | 0 comments
The Bible is different than the Koran or the Book of Mormon. Just not in the way you are probably supposing. According to Muhammad, God spoke to him through the angel Gabriel over the course of 23 years, dictating the various parts of the Koran. Muhammad isn’t the author, nor Gabriel; God is the author. Gabriel was the mouthpiece, Muhammad the recorder. If God had waited a couple of thousand years...
Voices in the Bible
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Oct 10, 2017 | 1 comment
The first and most basic step toward doing something evil is when you consider another person as something less. Less godly. Less good. Less human. When Europeans decided Africans with their superstitious religions were less godly, with their cannibilistic ways were less good, with their primitive jungle ways were less human, they justified capturing them, cramming them on ships like cargo, and selling...
How a Normal Person Moves ...
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Oct 3, 2017 | 0 comments
Note: This is adapted from a 2015 article I wrote after the massacre of nine African-Americans in a Charleston church. Sadly, I didn’t have to change much to adapt it. Once again we are reeling in the aftermath of another mass killing, the worst one in U.S. history. As usual, we also have to listen to the same rhetoric from both sides of the gun issue, then watch while nothing gets done before the country...
Las Vegas and Our Culture ...
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Oct 3, 2017 | 0 comments
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. There are passages in the Bible that are hard to understand. We puzzle over them, read Bible commentaries, listen to Christian leaders we trust talk about them, and still we end up scratching our heads. This is not one of those passages. What Paul is talking about, we all understand. You don’t have to be a...
Free to be Your Best Self
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Sep 26, 2017 | 0 comments
God’s kind of love is the highest kind of love. It is unconditional, freely-given, abundant, never-ending, and steadfast through all circumstances. “What can separate us from the love of God?” Paul asks in Romans 8. “Nothing,” he says. Not the most powerful person on earth, now or in the future. Not death or the forces that bring it. There is no height that exceeds it, nor depth it will not stoop to. It...
God’s Offensive Love
Posted by Larry Eubanks on Sep 20, 2017 | 0 comments
We’ve all heard sermons and lectures about surrendering to God. We’ve sat through plenty of Sunday School lessons about surrendering to God. There are books about surrendering to God. We sing songs about surrendering to God: “I Surrender All.” It’s in our religious vocabulary. Surrender your life to Jesus. Ministers talk about the time they surrendered to the call to the ministry. So it’s definitely a...
If Surrendering to God is ...
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Welcome!
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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