Tag: Christianity

Digging in Deeper: Acts 2:46-47

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“Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple, and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. Every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When the church exploded into existence and as it began to spread across the Roman Empire thanks to the faithful, devoted work of the apostle Paul, it was something new. Entirely new. There wasn’t anything else in the world quite like it. Because of that, it was often attractive to people who were wealthy and influential. It was a novelty, and people who fancy themselves as sitting at the top of the social ladder are often drawn to new things so they can say they were the first to see and experience them. Some two thousand years later, Christianity wasn’t new anymore. It was old. Very old. It was passe. The wealthy and influential didn’t care much anymore. And this was separate and apart from all of the criticism it was receiving for both imagined and real faults on the part of the church. But in the last couple of years, something interesting has begun to happen. Let’s talk about it for a few minutes today.

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Morning Musing: Romans 1:8-10

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“First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you because the news of your faith is being reported in all the world. God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in telling the good news about his Son — that I constantly mention you, always asking in my prayers that if it is somehow in God’s will, I may now at last succeed in coming to you.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

On rare occasions I have the opportunity to preach somewhere other than my church. When this happens, I don’t approach the message the same way as I do with the people I know and preach to every week. Instead, I try to stay more generalized in my focus and encouraging in my tone. No one wants to get scolded by a stranger. Paul had never visited the church in Rome. As a result, he didn’t approach them with quite the same familiarity as he did the church in Corinth that he had planted and spent nearly two years pastoring. Today, tomorrow, and Monday, let’s take a look at how Paul greeted these people he had never met.

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Important Origins

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The beginning of the new year is often a time for messages of challenge and encouragement. In putting on a good face for a fresh start, though, it is easy to overlook or ignore problems and challenges that still exist. Doubt is one of those. And so, as we get started on this new year, we are taking a couple of weeks to talk about doubt, where it comes from, why that matters, and how God helps us deal with them. Thanks for joining me on this first sermon journey of the new year.

Important Origins

I have an important question for you as we get started this morning: Have you taken down your Christmas lights yet? Our tree was down on the 26th, mostly because we wanted full access to our living room again. The outside lights, though, we usually leave up at least a few days longer. We actually just got them all down in the last couple of days. We always put a line of lights across the front of our house, but it can’t be one continuous line because we have this weird extra roofline that breaks right at the front door. We’ve tried taking a string of lights across the gap, but they always look weird hanging loosely in this sort of no man’s land. So, we just break the strands of lights up and run cords to two different places. 

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Morning Musing: Psalm 127:3

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“Sons are indeed a heritage from the Lord, offspring, a reward.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

As the old saying goes, a broken clock is still right twice a day. For the better part of a generation, Disney has been one of, if not the, primary entertainment-producing companies in the world. But in recent years, they seem to have forgotten that they are in the business of making money, not pushing a particular cultural agenda. As a result, they haven’t been making money quite like they once were. But for all of their cultural tone-deafness, there are some signs they are starting to turn a corner and remember that one of their primary audiences is families. One of the latest such signs came in the recently completed and final season of What If?…

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Advent Reflections: Matthew 2:1-2

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“After Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of King Herod, wise men from the east arrived in Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star at its rising and have come to worship him.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Starting with today, I think we have something on the calendar just about every single day for the next three weeks. That seems to happen every year at this time. Winter sports begin and every group wants to have a holiday gathering and there are extra church activities and there’s extra shopping to be done and decorating the house and all of that sits on top the regular events and meetings that don’t stop simply because there’s extra stuff going on. All of this busyness can easily overwhelm us and leave us completely unprepared for the actual celebration that lies ahead of us. Rather than getting excited for the season, we just want it to be over. How do we keep that from happening? As we begin our Advent journey today, let’s talk about keeping our focus where it most needs to be.

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