Reflections on the loving kindness of the Triune God
One of the startling moments in Christ’s ministry came as he answered a tough question on divorce and remarriage. Jesus told his followers that marriage is meant to be a lifelong commitment that precludes divorce (see Matthew 19); and they then asked him about the option for divorce that Moses had provided in the Old …
Read More Hard HeartsI thought I knew all about Jesus by the time I was a teenager. I had been raised in a Christian home and was well-churched. Throughout my childhood I heard about Jesus in a number of venues: at church, in Sunday school, at church camps, and in moments of Bible reading. Yet when I actually met Jesus …
Read More Jesus the RevolutionaryLet me propose a possibility. What if God—who we know loves books—is now producing the greatest of all stories? And what if we are part of that Story, a Story we will all get to read once we reach eternity? Let me suggest, too, that our own part in the Story will be interpreted and expressed from God’s …
Read More The Story of storiesWhere is God these days? Is he paying any attention to my life and needs? Does he know what’s going on in our lives? In our families, churches, and neighborhoods? We hear in church that God rules the universe and knows every thought we think, and every act we do. So why is it that he …
Read More What does God have to say?This weekend I’m in beautiful Hawai’i to teach Romans at the Bible Institute of Hawaii. I’m refreshed, as always, to have renewed fellowship with its director, Clive Cowell and Maya his wife. Clive has been gracious enough to supply me with a second guest entry for this site (see his earlier entry in the April 2009 archive). …
Read More Images of the ChurchThe irony wasn’t lost on me. All my writing of the past three months evaporated in a keystroke. The subject of my writing? Sin. The cause of the lost file? A computer virus that wiped out both my back-up file and my hard drive. I hadn’t made any print copies of the project so I …
Read More Thank you Lord!The Bible is a faith-producing book. As we read it boldly and regularly it generates a response: a growing confidence in God and, with that, a sense of entrustment. The Bible is also brutally honest. It tells stories of misguided faith and un-faith. For the faithful reader those stories help in navigating a dangerously skeptical …
Read More Hearts both tender and hardThis is a new iteration of a story I’ve used in talks and in earlier informal compositions. The Bible will strike most objective readers as odd, very odd. Why? Because it has so much gross content: sin, arrogance, murder, incompetence, hatred, brazen betrayals, and much more. The startled reader who takes up the book without …
Read More Parable of the capsized cruise shipThis is a revision of a post I first offered a few years ago for the Multnomah University website that maintains Alumni connections. Years ago, long before today’s satellite GPS—global-positioning-systems—the standard way for navigating boats of any size through inland waterways was to combine a set of resources: the boat’s radar, its magnetic compass, …
Read More Navigating by faithFifteen years ago last Tuesday the killings started. In just 100 days almost a million people were killed. Nearly two thousand years ago last Friday God’s Son was killed. The conjunction of the two remembrances in one week was striking to me even though the events are distant from each other in time and scale. …
Read More Genocide and the Cross