Inside Repentance

If you think about it, Jesus could be horribly inconsistent in the way that he treated people. On the one hand, he could treat people with such grace and kindness that it almost seemed as if he was cavalier about their sin, enjoying dinner fellowship with cheating, traitorous tax collectors and letting...

Let God Be God

In the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve committed the original sin—“original” not in the sense that it was The-First-Sin-Ever but rather that it’s the first sin that any of us take that leads to all the rest—when they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In other words,...

Jesus Ain’t No Snake-on-a-Stick

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. In Numbers 21 God has just helped the Israelites defeat a Canaanite king. They are heading to the Promised Land, and they start complaining about the food. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water,...

Impossible

A Message Delivered on Christmas Eve, 2014 When you read the gospels it is evident that the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke aren’t the same. That’s because Matthew and Luke aren’t interested in telling what happened, but what it means. Matthew says everything he wants to say with Magi, and Luke says...

Letting “Emmanuel” Be Enough

“‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God is with us.’” God is with us. After a few hundred years, the Israelites of the first century had to be wondering. It was a period of defeat, exile, occupation, and extreme brutality, made...

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