Morning Musing: Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

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“Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their efforts. For if either falls, his companion can lift him up; but pity the one who falls without another to lift him up.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When God was creating the world, everything was good. Again and again this refrain echoes across the unfolding drama of creation. Each thing God makes He pronounces good. Then He gets to us and says it is very good. It’s really a beautiful picture. That’s chapter 1. In chapter 2 we get a more intimate look at the story of creation focused in on the creation of people. There, once God has created all of the world and just the man something suddenly changes. God says, “It is not good.” And what is the thing that isn’t good? It is not good for the man to be alone. We were not made to do life on our own. And while marriage is one way to make sure we don’t have to try it, this morning I want to talk about another, equally valid and more broadly available option (since not everyone is called to marriage): friendship. And I want to do this through the lens of a recently concluded Netflix series. Here’s why you need to watch Alexa and Katie.

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Morning Musing: Mark 8:33

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“But turning around and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are not thinking about God’s concerns but human concerns.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever gotten more than you bargained for? Sometimes this feels like a very good thing. I once dropped four tokens on a Kung Fu Panda video game at an arcade where you had to punch these pads in the right sequence…and won it. The whole thing. Right in front of my kids. I was super dad. We got so many tickets all three boys went home with playground balls. If you know how arcade reward transactions go, you’ll understand we hit the jackpot. Maybe you’ve hit an actual jackpot. You put that one last nickel in the slot, pulled the handle, and filled up your bucket. (Disclaimer: I’ve never actually been to a casino, but that’s how it looks like it works on TV.) Sometimes, though, it doesn’t feel so nice. You playfully tease someone after a day that’s been much harder than you realize and instead of playfully teasing back, they bite your head off. What Peter experienced here was a bit more in line with this second situation. His getting burned, though, offers a lesson we do well to learn (spoiler alert: it’s not that we shouldn’t argue with Jesus).

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Digging in Deeper: Mark 8:31-32

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“Then he began to teach them that it was necessary for the Son of Man to suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, be killed, and rise after three days. He spoke openly about this. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever really had your mind blown? The disciples thought they were really starting to figure some things out. After all the doubts and questions and misunderstandings, they had finally gotten their minds around the truth: Jesus was the Messiah. They were certain of it. Everything He had done pointed them unavoidably to this conclusion. There was just one problem? They didn’t have any idea what that actually meant. They thought they did. But they were wrong. Learning the truth was something they were not prepared to do.

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Morning Musing: Mark 8:27-29

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“Jesus went out with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. And on the road he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’ They answered him, ‘John the Baptist; others, Elijah; still others, one of the prophets.’ ‘But you,’ he asked them, ‘who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered him, ‘You are the Messiah.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Can I pull back the curtain on my nerdiness with you just a bit? I love tests. I do. It’s disgusting, I know, but I love them. It helps that I’m generally a pretty good test taker. I don’t get anxious; I just get to work. But I really do enjoy them. Well, mostly. When it’s a test I’m pretty sure I’m not going to do well on, I don’t look forward to those. Generally speaking, though, I look forward to them. They give you a chance to prove what you know. They give you a chance to demonstrate that you really do know something. The other side of that, though, is equally true. They reveal whether or not you actually know it. As Jesus and the disciples were on this retreat through Gentile lands, Jesus gave them what amounted to their mid-term exam. There was just one question and the answer was pretty straightforward. What hung on that answer, though, was eternity. Well, we may hundreds of years removed from this mid-term exam, but the question is still one we all will have to answer at some point in our lives.

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Three-in-One

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Our culture is changing. Quickly. Christianity has not been the dominant worldview for a long time, but a clear alternative is rising fast to take its place in ways we haven’t really seen before. This new alternative is aggressive and intolerant and it increasingly has access to the levers of political power. What this means is a number of things, but perhaps most significant among them is that for followers of Jesus it has never been more important that we have a clear and firm handle on exactly what we believe and why those beliefs are better (that is, more in line with reality) than the available alternatives. This week we kicked off a brand-new teaching series aimed at addressing this very matter called, You Believe What? For the next few weeks we’re going to be talking about some of the most basic beliefs of the Christian worldview and why those matter so much. In this first part we start at the top with God. What is He like and what does that mean for us? Let’s talk about it.

Three-in-One

When I was a senior in college, I had to take biochemistry. Other than advanced courses focusing in on one particular branch of chemistry or another, biochemistry was the hardest chemistry course there was at the school. It took all the hard parts of both chemistry and biology and combined them into one challenging package. And the big project for the course was to write a research paper on some biochemical molecule. I still remember my molecule: cisplatin. It’s one of the earliest-discovered chemo drugs. I worked my tail off for that paper. I spent hours in our library. I took a day and drove down to the University of Missouri to use their much bigger and more equipped library to find some really obscure old journal articles so that I could cite original sources accurately instead of merely referencing them from other articles. I think the final project came in at something like 25-30 pages with a bibliography that ran for 5-6 pages. I did really well on it too. It helped that Dr. Nagan was a great teacher.

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