Loving God, Loving Others, Right here.
Wednesday, July 8, 2020God Revealed Through the Word The Bible is a gift that God gave to reveal who God is to us. Through the stories in the Bible, we are torn away from the things that occupy our time, and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth (p.53). […]
Tuesday, July 7, 2020Solace in the Psalms Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out that the Psalter (the collection of Psalms) occupies a unique place in the Bible. The Psalter is filled with prayers and songs that express a wide array of emotion–faith and frustration, joy and jealousy, peace and petulance (ask your mom or dad what that […]
Monday, July 6, 2020A Day With God “At the threshold of a new day stands the Lord who made it.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer called followers of Jesus to look at the beginning of each new day with the hope that God gives us. Our anxieties and concerns of the night before can be set aside. The distractions that […]
Friday, July 3, 2020Not Enough Years ago a guy named Christian Smith did a survey of young adults where he discovered and named an understanding of God that threatens true faith. He called it “moralistic therapeutic deism”. He pointed out that moralistic therapeutic deism is not just a problem in how young adults understand God, […]
Thursday, July 2, 2020Threat “Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go.” Joshua 1:7 When God brought the children of Israel into the land that had […]
Wednesday, July 1, 2020Control When I was a kid, I played video games called Paperboy and Super Mario Brothers on my Nintendo Gaming System. It had a gray controller with black and red buttons that plugged into the gaming console. I remember days when my thumbs would be sore from pounding on the controller most […]
Tuesday, June 30, 2020Boundary Walter Bruggemann writes, “Sabbath sets a boundary to our best, most intense efforts to manage life and organize land for our security and well-being” pg. 59. If you look back at history, you can see how–again and again–people try to find their security in the land and not in God; how people […]
Monday, June 29, 2020People of the Land In some of the first passages in the Bible that we read about sabbath, the idea of sabbath is connected to land. Sabbath was set up by God as a day for those who worked the land to find rest (Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 15). Sabbath was a […]
Friday, June 26, 2020Prayer of Confession O Father in Heaven,Who knit together my hands and feet to serve you and my soul to seek after you,With sorrow and remorse in my heart I stand before you,Repenting of my faults and failures this week. Too long, O Father, have I tried your patience. Too often have I […]
Thursday, June 25, 2020Freedom When God’s people were rescued from slavery in Egypt, God was saying to the world, “These are my people.” The children of Israel were not chosen to be God’s people because there was something special about them. In fact, they were chosen because there wasn’t anything special about them. They were […]