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- Holy Spirit I - Holy Spirit I: Who is the Holy Spirit? I wonder if some people see the Holy Spirit as kind of God Jr.? You know, less than God, the Father. After all that is God the Father, emphasis there. And what about God the Son, is he another God Jr.? Wait a minute. Is the Holy Spirit even related? Those are the crazy thoughts that the evil one sticks in whenever we seek to understand the Trinity, the Triune God, the Father, Son, Holy Spirit...all One. For some, the concept of a Triune God is difficult to grasp, at first. The tendency is to look at the entities separately because, often times, we are introduced to the whole idea of God exactly that way. Continue reading
- My Unbelief - My Unbelief: Do you have any unbelief? Momentary lapses in your faith journey where you thought you could do it all on your own? But, then found you couldn’t? In the midst of your prayer life has your mind wander into tomorrow or, worse, into yesterday and yesterday’s troubles? Do you find yourself dwelling on an argument you had with a friend? The Mark 9 passage was recently used in a Verse-A-Day devotional. The commentator made this statement: “From the father’s perspective, the spirit possessing his son is trying to kill him. Jesus asks, “How long has he been like this” to get to the bottom of this man’s heart and reveal this man’s faith.” The man is desperate and he cries out, if you can do anything, help us. Jesus’ replies with -- “If you can believe.” That is when the desperate father cries out, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!” Continue reading
- Blessings and More Blessings - Blessings and More Blessings: The apostle Paul never heard the song Count Your Blessings. But it’s clear from his writings that he takes its message to heart at the beginning of his letter to the Ephesians. Here at the start of the above passage, he leads off with a note of praise to God for his blessings, then proceeds to count them one by one, so to speak. Look at the passage. It is filled with phrases that should give us a sense of confidence and peace that God is in our lives. First is God’s guarantee and the assurance that we are eternity-bound. The tone is one of gratitude for His love for Christians “everywhere”. Continue reading
- Reprise – Our Failures? - Reprise - Our Failures? Jesus is not praying for us in our success! He is praying for us in our failures! Wow. What a statement! Do you believe that? Jesus is rejoicing in the success He sees in our lives, which is different than the success we may aspire to, and the success He sees in us does not surprise Him. He has equipped us for that success, He has foreordained that we would succeed. So, in our equipping and in the foreordaining, He has set the stage for what would follow…our success through His will. Continue reading
- Separation of Church and State? Impossible! - Separation of Church and State? Impossible! This has been a source of discussion, argument, violence, immigration, civil unrest, and wars. It has divided families, it has divided nations. The concept has evolved since Moses came down from Mount Sinai carrying stone tablets. The evolution has been spotty, to say the least. In 890 AD, an English king named Alfred the Great laid out the Book of Laws or Dooms. The English word for judgment or law was “doom”. King Alfred said: Doom very evenly! Do not doom one doom to the rich; another to the poor! Nor doom one doom to your friend; another to your foe! You can smile, but would you believe that this was the foundation piece of English common law! Continue reading
- Imperfectly Beautiful - Imperfectly Beautiful: My body is a broken toy and I am imperfectly beautiful. Those might be the words of Angie Ebba, disabled, an artist, a writer and a teacher. In an article on the website Healthline, she started with this statement: “I am broken..." It is her reality. Her story is inspiring and offers encouragement for all of us who age, become infirm, forgetful, or acquire debilitating illnesses. We think of another broken body, and we hear those words, “This is my body broken for you…” those words should resonate with us. Each word has meaning. This is my body... What about you and your encounter with Jesus, there on Calvary? Where are our thoughts when we hear His words, “This my body being broken for you”? Continue reading
- Render to Caesar - Render to Caesar: Question: If Christ had done what we are doing -- who would ever have been saved? I don’t know. Do I have an answer? I think that if Christ has done what we are doing there would never have been followers, let alone disciples to carry-on God’s work. The fact of the matter is, in God’s plan, what we are doing would not persist in the presence of the light of Christ. Thank you, Jesus, that our sins are forgiven. Jesus has a plan, an unworkable plan in the eyes of the world, but a plan that is shear perfection. Continue reading
- Praying or Braying? - Praying or Braying? I'm not sure anyone knows how many sermons Martin Luther preached. We know that there were days when he would preach five different sermons in a given day, and there were times when his congregation thought his sermons would never end! Most of his sermons came from Scripture, but, especially after his denunciation of Catholicism at the start of the Protestant Reformation, some of his preaching became prickly, and caused consternation even among his fellow pastors. Although the Reformation is usually considered to have started in 1517 with the publication of the 95-Theses by Martin Luther, the Papal war really broke out in 1521 with the Edict of Worms which condemned Luther and officially banned citizens from defending, or even reading his ideas. That’s when his sermons got very interesting, and pointed. Continue reading
- The Other Side? - The Other Side? In the last Watchword, entitled “You are a Disciple”, I wrote about Jesus going where others feared to tread, going to the “other side”. Whether are you are aware of it, we operate on a mentality, and in a culture, that speaks of Us versus Them. We on one side, they on the other. All we need to do is look at the color chart, Reds versus Blues. Whites versus blacks, or maybe you would prefer Protestants versus Catholics or, and so it goes. We’re no longer shirts versus skins but it’s just as divisive and competitive. We do take sides, don’t we? We tend to divide the human race based on ethnicity, culture, language and religion. Continue reading
- You Are a Disciple - You Are a Disciple: So much of the time when we read the Bible we seek to understand what is happening, what the meaning of the parable, or understanding the flow of biblical history. I wonder if we ever stop and try on sandals of the fisherman, the way of the disciple, the transformation of common a man into a disciple of Jesus. One of my dear friends, who happened to have been one of my former pastors, stressed the need to understand the topography of the area, the geography, and the culture as we read the holy Word. That’s not easy to fully grasp, but it does add depth to the impact that divine power has on common humans. All but one of the original 12 disciples came from Galilee, and the majority of them were common fisherman making a living from the lake. They had little background in theology, many could not read, and all had been raised in a culture where Judaism played a significant, influencing role. In that culture, and In that geography, the Sea of Galilee served as a barrier between Galilee/Judiasm and God, on the west, and the Decapolis (the area we now know of as the Golan Heights), on the east where Satan dwelled, Continue reading
- The Next Hard Thing - The Next Hard Thing: Joseph Hellerman, in writings entitled Reconstructing Honor in Roman Philippi, calls our attention to a difficult decision that Paul made at a critical time in his life, as he was trying to establish a Christian church in the little outpost of Phllippi. In this community, there were members of the elite and nobodies of society. There were women, children, slaves, a real mix where Paul was trying to make them into a family: brothers and sisters of the faith. So, Paul is arrested. We do not know what the charge was, but for Rome that didn’t matter. He was badly beaten and eventually released. It was at this point that he protested to the authorities that he was a Roman citizen. The officials are shocked and apologetic, and Frightened, for they have violated Roman law. Here’s the question, why didn’t Paul use his getting out of jail free card when he was first arrested? Continue reading
- Talitha cumi! - Talitha cumi! In one of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories, I found this quote: “In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.” I was researching the words “awake” or “awakening”, trying to find an appropriate title for a story I have been working on, and the Hemingway quote popped up. Then I came across the Hebrew greeting, Talitha cumi, and among it’s various meanings was “Child, wake up!” In a recent sermon, based partly on the Mark 5 passage, the pastor was making the point that death and sleep are related in the sense that each day we awake to the day that God has made, a type of resurrection. Continue reading
- Unfair! - Unfair!: I was 11-years old when my family moved from Ohio to Indiana, and I entered the seventh grade, in the middle of the fall semester. I was the youngest and smallest in my new class, had no friends and carried the burden of being a "preacher's kid". I believe that every child goes through times of embarrassment, even demeaning kinds of experiences. Maybe it's in the form of being bullied, or perhaps it is an unkind comment made by someone you thought was your friend. Those things happen in the course of our adult days as well, and being told by our Lord to Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, at that moment of pain or betrayal doesn't seem to help. Continue reading
- Cheap Grace - Cheap Grace: In Tim Keller’s book, The Prodigal God, he reminds us of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, being so appalled at how many in the German church gave in to Hitler in the early 1930s, that he took it upon himself to write his great work, The Cost of Discipleship. In that book, Bonhoeffer warns about the dangers of what he referred to as “cheap grace”, the idea that stresses only that God’s grace is free so that it doesn’t really matter how we live. I believe his point is that if we subscribe to cheap grace then we ignore how seriously God takes our sinful lives, and the infinite cost He paid for it. Continue reading
- Not a Saint? - Not a Saint? In a recent conversation with a friend, I thanked her for a kindness that she extended to me, telling her that “she was a saint”. Her reply was “I’m no saint”, to which I responded by telling her she certainly was, because that is the way God made us. We are saints not because we do good things, and lose out on saint-hood because of mistakes we make. We are saints because we are children of God. Check your Bible, for the heroes, the saints of Christianity. One of the most prominent stories in the Bible is about that saint, King David. He was great ruler but he was also a fornicator and, you can say, he was an adulterer as well. But King David wasn’t the only one. Plenty of other luminaries of the Bible did terrible things at various points in their lives. Saul was a disbeliever, Moses was a doubter. Jacob was a liar. Continue reading
- Mercy - Mercy: I think we often confuse mercy with Grace. While both are part of God’s character, there is, in truth, a big difference. At its core, mercy is not getting the punishment we deserve, while Grace is a gift we don’t deserve. Does that make sense? From another perspective, the dictionary defines grace as “courteous goodwill”, meaning it’s not asked for nor deserved, but is freely given. On the other hand, mercy is the “compassion and kindness shown” to someone who is subject to punishment and harm. It is an act meant to relieve someone of their suffering. Continue reading
- Fruit of the Spirit - Fruit of the Spirit: What is your definition of joy? Did you include the word happiness or any of its derivatives? They seem to be related, that’s true. But the difference is much greater than we might have thought. When we look at the Galatian scripture passage we see that joy it’s listed among the fruits of the spirit. We are also aware that happiness does not appear. When we speak of the fruits of the spirit we’re talking about the role that the Holy Spirit plays within us. We could conclude from that, that joy is an internal condition, related to peace and contentment. Joy does not reside in our circumstances. Continue reading
- Storms - Storms: The geography of the Sea of Galilee makes it subject to sudden and violent storms as the wind comes over the eastern mountains and drops suddenly onto the Sea. According to the weather service in that area, storms are likely when an east wind blows cool air over the warm air that covers the Sea, the cold air drops as the warm air rises and the sudden change can produce surprisingly furious storms in a short time, as it did in Jesus day. See Matthew 8. So, when the boat, loaded with disciples and Jesus himself, was overtaken by a sudden storm, the disciples had the know-how and the experience to cope with most storms, but not this time. In desperation, they called on Jesus. Continue reading
- Alone with God - Alone with God: There is a message here for us, one that too many ignore or, to my mind, misinterpret. It is a message that is repeated time and time again through the scriptures, Jesus getting this idea across to His hard-headed flock of sheep. Rest! In Luke 5:14 we see Jesus instructing the healed leper not to tell anyone, yet word got out and the crowds came. In Luke 6:12 we read that Jesus went alone to a hill (mountain) to pray. He was not teaching, healing, etc., He was simply talking with His Father. In Luke 9:18 we read One day Jesus left the crowds to pray alone. This was just before He told His disciples of His coming death. At the time of His transfiguration He took Peter, James and John with Him to be alone and pray. Repeatedly we see Jesus being alone, or with a few disciples, to spend time with the Father; before His teaching on prayer, before His arrest, while being crucified, and just before He died. Continue reading
- Memory Verse – 4/4 - Memory Verse – 4/4: Our men’s Bible study, Men in Mission, has been going strong for at least 40 years. One of those early saints in our study was Glen Hawkins, the father of our pastor at that time. I can still hear his very unique voice, reminding us, teaching us, to "trust in the Lord with all our hearts". There were times when he would elaborate, explaining what it means to truly trust in the Lord and seek to do His will in everyday things. He was a wonderful participant in our discussions and when he passed to the Lord we were better for having him with us for a time. I believe there are Saints like Glen in every Bible study group. Sometimes those Saints nag us a bit, sometimes they serve as instructors, sometimes they serve as the conscience of the group, moving us to serve. Continue reading
