Month: August 2025

Morning Musing: 1 Timothy 2:1-2

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“First of all, then, I urge that petitions, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all those who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What do you do when you don’t have any power? Well, one approach is to try to get some power. That would seem to make sense. After all, power is a good thing. We all want to have some power. But what about when that’s not an option? What then? You could gripe and complain. You could punish those who do have power by making their exercise of it as complicated and uncomfortable as possible. Neither of those, though, seem like terribly positive options. Much to the contrary, they will likely make things vastly more difficult for us. There is another way, though. Paul outlines a third way here could make quite a difference indeed. Let’s talk about the best thing to do when you don’t have any power.

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Morning Musing: Romans 11:6

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“Now if by grace, then it is not by works; otherwise grace ceases to be grace.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

This verse really goes with the last section. I could have kept it all together, but what Paul says right here is important enough that I felt like it needed to be treated individually. It’s important enough that Paul actually dedicated most of an entire letter to exploring and unpacking it (that would be Galatians). We won’t spend quite that much time on it today, but let’s take at least a couple of minutes to talk about the clearest statement Paul may have ever written on this absolutely essential Gospel concept.

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Digging in Deeper: Romans 11:1-5

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“I ask, then, has God rejected his people? Absolutely not! For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. Or don’t you know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah—how he pleads with God against Israel? ‘Lord, they have killed your prophets and torn down your altars. I am the only one left, and they are trying to take my life!’ But what was God’s answer to him? ‘I have left seven thousand for myself who have not bowed down to Baal.’ In the same way, then, there is also at the present time a remnant chosen by grace.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Mike Tyson is famous for saying “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Having things all worked out in theory and being able to adapt quickly to obstacles that come along with the goal of completely disrupting if not outright derailing our plans are two very different things. God had a plan for what He wanted to accomplish in and through Israel. Yet even for us to hear that sentence calls to mind things that God may not have meant. This is important for us to understand because trying to make sense out of what we understand God’s plans to have been and how things actually went can be tricky. Let’s join Paul in thinking through some of that here.

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Digging in Deeper: Romans 10:18-21

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“But I ask, ‘Did they not hear?’ Yes, they did: ‘Their voice has gone out to the whole earth, and their words to the ends of the world.’ But I ask, ‘Did Israel not understand?’ First, Moses said, ‘I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation; I will make you angry by a nation that lacks understanding.’ And Isaiah says boldly, ‘I was found by those who were not looking for me; I revealed myself to those who were not asking for me.’ But to Israel he says, ‘All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and defiant people.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

For the last two chapters now, Paul has been talking about Israel and their rejection of the Gospel. He has struggled with it emotionally even as he understands it experientially. But even though he understood the fact of it, he nonetheless marvels at it with his audience. Here, at the end of chapter 10, Paul begins asking some more hard questions about Israel’s rejection, God’s plans in light of it, and what this all means for non-Jewish followers of Jesus. Let’s start digging into this with him.

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Big Living

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Living in God’s big world requires us to be generous. But what does that actually look like? Today, as we continue our series, How Big Is Your World?, we are talking about the secret to living as big as we possibly can. The key here is found in a practice that often seems like little more than a religious exercise, but has the potential to be much, much more than that if we get it right. Read on to find out what it is and how to do it.

Big Living

When I was in high school, I was in the marching band. Now, at some schools, the marching band is where all the band nerds hang out, and everybody else pretty much ignores them because they’re all really weird. At my school this was kind of the case, but not entirely. I say “not entirely” because there were 250 of us, and 250 people out of a total school population of around 2,000 is pretty hard to ignore. There were band nerds everywhere. I mean, everywhere. We came from every class and group in the school too. There were jocks, cheerleaders, traditional nerds, Goth kids, pretty kids, Christians, atheists, math nerds, the weird scholar’s bowl kids (I was one of those too), drama kids, choir kids, debaters, rednecks, preppy kids, the kids who didn’t really fit into a single category because they tended to be all over the place, and so on and so forth. The band was really the melting pot of the school, and we all got along pretty well. It didn’t hurt that my sophomore year we went to Hawaii. Things got pretty popular after that. 

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