Month: September 2017

Morning Musings: Psalm 103:8-12

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“The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.  He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever.  He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.  For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

For anyone who would argue that the God of the Old Testament is somehow different from the God of the New Testament by being much angrier and more focused on judgment, you have to explain away passages like this one.  And this is not the only time this characterization appears in the Old Testament.   Read the rest…

Morning Musings: Proverbs 21:2

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“Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart.”  (ESV)

There is absolutely no better salesman on the rightness of what we plan to do than ourselves.  We can convince ourselves of literally anything given enough time and motivation.  If left to our own devices, we can justify just about any behavior.

One of the most popular slogans of our culture today is to follow your heart.  As warm and fuzzy as this advice is made to sound, however (and nobody has worked quite so hard to make it the central thought of every young person than Disney), the truth is that it is awful advice.  Absolutely awful.

Because of sin, our hearts are hopelessly corrupt and deceptive.  If we follow our own hearts we are going to find our way into nothing but trouble and lots of it.  If instead we turn ourselves over to the God who defines right and wrong and let Him be our guide regardless of where our heart is telling us to go, the likelihood of our finding ourselves on the right track goes up enormously.

The Lord weighs the heart.  Let us let Him weigh ours so that we stay following after Him on the path to life.

Morning Musings: 1 Corinthians 15:35-36

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“But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised?  With what kind of body do they come?’  You foolish person!  What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

The whole idea of the resurrection is a big one.  It’s a huge one.  It’s beyond what we can really understand.  We get resuscitation.  We get reanimation.  The latter is a pretty popular pop culture genre right now.  But resurrection?  That’s something new.  At least, it was in first century Corinth.  So, naturally, people who were culturally trained to be skeptical of theologies and philosophies that seemed to glorify the material over the spiritual as the Christian doctrine of the resurrection seemed to do began to ask some hard questions.   Read the rest…

Morning Musings: Psalm 102:12

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“But you, O Lord, are enthroned forever; you are remembered throughout all generations.”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

In last Friday’s Morning Musing we saw the psalmist here pouring out his heart to God from out of a place of utter desperation.  His world was falling to pieces and it felt like even God Himself had abandoned him.  Now, while there are a couple of psalms that end there in the darkness, most of them make a turn at some point.  Here we find the turn for this one.  Everything was falling apart and it seemed life itself might be ending, but…   Read the rest…

A Call to Action

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As we continue in our series, A Word on Reality, this past Sunday morning we looked at John’s call to make loving one another something that goes beyond being merely a slogan we claim, to an essential part of our identity in Christ.  Read on for more…

A Call to Action

Have you ever seen or worn a t-shirt with a slogan on it?  I suspect you have.  I had one in high school that my folks recently dug up in one of their closets and mailed to me that read: “The football team will be performing before and after tonight’s featured performance of the marching band halftime show.”  It featured a picture of a trombone slide piercing a football.  Now, if you’re a football fan or player you may be rolling your eyes, but I’m comfortable admitting that I was a huge band nerd in high school.  Also, our football team was awful.  And with over 200 kids in the marching band, for most home games our parents easily made up the biggest percentage of the crowd.  So yes, the crowd really was mostly coming to the game just to see the band.  Read the rest…