Tag: Digging in Deeper

Digging in Deeper: Matthew 6:24

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“No one can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

There are 32 teams in the National Football League. That means on any given week, 32 individuals are at the helm of one of the 32 most elite American football teams in the world. In the most recent census, the population of the United States was about 330 million people. If I have my math right, that means on a given weekend, about one out of every 10.5 million people is playing at the quarterback position in the NFL. While any one person’s odds of being an NFL quarterback are fantastically higher than winning something like the Powerball jackpot (which should tell you something about how silly it is to play the lottery), they’re still not great. That means the only quarterbacking most folks are ever going to do is the armchair variety. It’s super easy to sit in the comfort of your recliner and know what someone should have done in a situation you could have in no ways handled if you were actually in their shoes. It’s not really a good look. So, naturally, this morning, I’m going to do a bit of armchair quarterbacking. What’s going on with Tom Brady?

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Digging in Deeper: Hebrews 12:11-13

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“No discipline seems enjoyable at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Therefore, strengthen your tired hands and weakened knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be dislocated but healed instead.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Do you know why most people don’t exercise the way they should? Because they don’t want to. I rushed that, didn’t I? You were getting all of your excuses ready to start listing off in defense of your lack of exercise, and I cut your short. But the truth is, at the end of the day, we don’t exercise as much as we should (and I’ll let you define “should” in a way that makes you comfortable) because there are other things we’d rather do more. We have time for all of the things we most want to do. Period. Of course, the reason we don’t want to exercise as much as we want to do other things is because exercising is hard. We don’t like doing hard things. But sometimes, hard things that hurt us in the moment help us in the long run. This is an important thing to keep in mind in the next part of Hebrews 12 here. Let’s take a look at this together.

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Digging in Deeper: Matthew 6:1

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“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. Otherwise, you have no reward with your Father in heaven.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

For the last several weeks, I have been working through the Gospel of Matthew with our Wednesday night Bible study group. It has been an absolute delight taking our time examining the story of Jesus as told by the converted tax collector. In particular, for the last few weeks we have been wading through the Sermon on the Mount. In the second part of Jesus’ most famous sermon, He talks about giving, praying, and fasting. And if you’re not paying close attention, it seems like those three things are really the focus of His comments. But they aren’t. Instead, Jesus is using those three things to talk about something that afflicts all of us. As we wrapped up our look at this section this past Wednesday night, I spent some time unpacking His larger (and more significant) point here. This morning, I’d like to share with you some thoughts on what Jesus had to say about self-righteousness.

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Morning Musing: 2 Timothy 4:3-4

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“For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, will multiply teachers for themselves because they have an itch to hear what they want to hear. They will turn away from hearing the truth and will turn aside to myths.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We live in a day when two competing trends are holding sway in our storytelling. The first is the fact that we love stories with happy endings. We want heroes to win and bad guys to lose. The second trend is our belief that there really aren’t any bad guys. In order to prove this, as we have made stories about all the heroes, film studios hoping to make some more money have started taking characters who were villains and attempting to rehabilitate them by having them star in stories as the sort of good guys. A recent and highly anticipated film on Disney+ not only puts these trends on display, but also reveals how silly this trend is. Let’s talk today about Hocus Pocus 2 and Disney’s loss of any kind of a meaningful moral vision.

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Digging in Deeper: Matthew 22:37-40

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“He said to him, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Confession time: I’m not much for trying new things. New things bring the possibility of failure, and I’m not much for failure. I’m more of a habit and routine guy. Once I find something that works – which, admittedly requires trying new things at least occasionally – you’re going to find me generally pretty difficult to break from it to try something else. Of course, new things also bring the possibility of experiencing success you wouldn’t otherwise experience. On the whole, it can pay big to step out and try something new. Let’s talk this morning about the latest new thing from Marvel Studios: She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.

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