One of the things that helps make up a Christian community are the misfits, the people who don’t quite fit in community. If everyone fit perfectly, we would have a jigsaw puzzle of a Thomas Kinkaide painting, and not a gathering of real people. Real community has real problems. But there is a difference between …
Songs or Snarls
This Table is a table of love and fellowship. God has set it so that we may sit around it and willingly (that is, lovingly) partake of it. In partaking of it in faith, we are partaking of Christ, partaking of one another, and partaking of the bread and wine. When we are done, Christ …
Thanksgiving 2015
Thanksgiving is a holiday with a beautiful orientation. Scripture tells us that we are to give thanks at all times (1 Thess. 5:17-18) and for all things (Eph. 5:20), and so this day should not be a day to set aside a year-long disobedience of ingratitude. Rather it should serve as a capstone of our …
Does Nature Have a Nature?
I just finished listening to a talk which addressed the question of whether regeneration should be defined as a change in nature, and was reminded of something from Wodehouse. Some minds are like the soup in a bad restaurant — better left unstirred. Two basic things came to mind, and I will let them float …
Surveying the Text: Ezekiel
Introduction: In taking a book of the Bible a week, we are not really doing justice to any of them. We can certainly give an orientation. We can describe the basic themes. We can perhaps give you a taste for the book, such that you want to pursue a deeper reading on your own. But …
The Potency of Right Worship
INTRODUCTION: Many of the problems confronting modern Christians are the result of diligently trying to do the right thing . . . in the wrong categories. They try guitar fingering on a mandolin; they try chess rules on a backgammon board; they apply the rules of French grammar to English. And for us to draw …
What Money Always Does
We are talking about the grace of God resulting in the growth of community. But we are not disembodied souls. God created the human soul to function in the body—the body is not simply a carrying case. We are soul and body together. This means that as community grows up around us, characterized by things …
What Grace Is Made From
This Table represents to us the death of Jesus Christ. Because the death of Jesus was the death of all accusation, and the peculiar kind of envy that fuels so much accusation, this means that the sins that betrayed Jesus to the cross were actually sins that were being themselves led to the cross, there …
Confession and Works
One of the things that is very much part of the DNA of our public ministry is the teaching that Christians need to keep short accounts with God, confessing their sins regularly and honestly. The teaching of Scripture on the subject is plain enough. “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: But whoso confesseth …
Three-Fold Fellowship
Grace and Peace “At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) “I John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ” …