Digging in Deeper: Judges 6:22-23

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“Then Gideon perceived that he was the angel of the Lord.  And Gideon said, ‘Alas, O Lord God!  For now I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face.’  But the Lord said to him, ‘Peace be to you.  Do not fear; you shall not die.'”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

Have you ever been so upset about something that you were missing the world right in front of your face?  Most of us have at some point.  Life doesn’t go our way and we let it put us in a place where we can’t get past what went wrong.  All of our attention gets sucked into the frustration and things that most people would say are obvious don’t even register on our radar. Read the rest…

Morning Musings: Judges 6:36-37

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“Then Gideon said to God, ‘If you will save Israel by my hand, as you have said, behold, I am laying a fleece of wool on the threshing floor.  If there is dew on the fleece alone, and it is dry on all the ground, then I shall know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you have said.'”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

Gideon’s fleece has become synonymous with testing God.  And that’s exactly what Gideon was doing.  But, far from anything praiseworthy or worth imitating, this was an act of faithlessness by a man who was a coward. Read the rest…

Job One

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This past Father’s Day I issued an encouragement and a challenge to dads.  If we take the Scriptures at face value, we are the ones primarily invested with the responsibility of passing on our faith to the next generation.  In what follows, I talk about how exactly to do it.  Thanks for reading.

 

Job One

As most of you know, I am a Kansas City Royals fan.  I know…this has been a tough summer.  But three years ago, it wasn’t.  Three years ago was the best summer to be a Royals fan since…well…the summer before (there’s even a children’s book about that one that is on the shelves at home).  But before that you have to go back 1985 to find one of comparative excitement.  As for the summers in between, I’ll be honest: They were pretty rough.  There were four seasons when we lost more than 100 games (for my non-baseball fans that’s a notable mark of having had an exceedingly bad season)…three of which were back-to-back-to-back.  There were many more when we were just generally bad.  The badness occurred at pretty much all levels from the top of the organization to the bottom. Read the rest…

Morning Musings: Judges 6:12-13

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“And the angel of the Lord appeared to him and said to him, ‘The Lord is with you, O mighty man of valor.’  And Gideon said to him, ‘Please, my lord, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?  And where are his wonderful deeds that our fathers recounted to us, saying, “Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?”  But now the Lord has forsaken us and given us into the hand of Midian.'”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

The story of Gideon is one of my favorites.  This isn’t because of why you might think.  It is often presented to highlight the faith and courage of Gideon as he takes his army of 300 and defeats the thousands of Midianite soldiers in a decidedly non-traditional fashion (God seems to excel at devising…creative…battle plans to make sure He gets the glory for the victory).  While perhaps Gideon was courageous and faithful in that moment, I tend to see his story as evidence of God’s willingness and ability to work through anybody to accomplish His plans, even a whiney coward. Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: John 10:41

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“And many came to him.  And they said, ‘John did no sign, but everything that John said about this man was true.'”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

Do you want to be great?  Most of us yearn for that.  I heard about another pastor a few weeks ago who does a blog too.  He has 200,000 followers.  My carnal first thought was, “I want 250,000.”  That’s inside of all of us.  We want greatness.  We want to be not just recognized, but recognized more than everybody else for what we have done.  Our culture encourages this too.  Our heroes are not great statesmen and scientists and public servants anymore.  Our heroes are sports stars and movie stars and social media stars.  It’s a great rat race whose catch is that there isn’t any cheese waiting at the end of the path. Read the rest…