Reflections on the loving kindness of the Triune God
Picture a man coming home a day early from a trip, pleased and ready to surprise his dearly loved wife. As he nears his home in the early evening he sees an SUV parked across the street. It belongs to a man in their church home community. Puzzled, the husband also notices that the living …
Read More A proper and powerful jealousyHelmut Thielicke (1908-86), a German pastor and educator who remained faithful even under Hitler’s regime in WWII, wrote that the real competition in theology is not between modernists (or “liberals”) and conservatives but consists in a more basic—and unnoticed—conflict between Cartesians and non-Cartesians. As I’ll share below, I agree with him, but first let me …
Read More A Corollary to Thielicke’s AxiomChildren grow. Their bodies get bigger, stronger, faster, and more coordinated in a steady march to physical maturity. Appetites are satisfied by food and applied through exercise. But growth is never so certain in our inner makeup. Educators, for instance, have identified stages of cognitive growth: how we grow in our thinking skills. They point to …
Read More GrowthToday I preached a sermon on hell. A friend and pastor, who was interrupted in a sermon series on heaven by a surgery, had scheduled the sermon for today to address hell as the obverse of heaven. As I agreed to cover for him it was a chance to visit an important but rarely visited …
Read More HellIs it proper to treat God as our heavenly Genie-in-a-bottle? As in, “Lord, I ask you to . . . .” Or, “Please, dear God, we need you to . . . .” Always asking, always seeking, always knocking. We all do it. When we pray we commonly ask for benefits or we tell God …
Read More “I am not a commodity”The Bible presents readers with some sharp oppositions. One instance, in James, pits the wisdom from below against the wisdom from above. Another is the truth of God’s word set against the serpent’s ultimate lie in Eden. Let me take up yet another for today’s reflection: the opposition of the love of power versus the …
Read More Two LovesI 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 storiesI’m writing this in Boise, a city where I was touched by God’s grace many years ago. In 1976 I had been invited by a church there to launch a ministry to young adults. Now, decades later, I’ve spent the weekend visiting friends from that era—Nick, Howie, Way and Beth. Each has gone on to …
Read More Living the good lifeSometime near the year 220 the church father Tertullian asked a provocative question: “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians?” That question touches a tension I felt in my career as a college and graduate school educator. I found …
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