“You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
I’ve said many times before that context is king when it comes to understanding the Scriptures. I’ll continue to beat that drum until I have you dancing to it in your sleep. But there aren’t many verses for which such a reminder is so important as this one. Taken out of context, this verse threatens to unravel our whole understanding of salvation and seems to justify the stifling legalism that has given Christianity such a bad name in so many places. How do we get this right?
This past Sunday we kicked off a brand-new teaching series called, Bible Stories to Make You Squirm. If you are the kind of person who believes the Scriptures should have some kind of a place of authority in your life, you are left with a thorny problem: There are some stories in there that are just downright uncomfortable. If they are there on purpose and for our benefit, what are we supposed to do with them? In this series, we’ll explore several of these hard stories and begin to see that all Scripture really is for our benefit. Even the hard stuff.
You Want Me to Do What?
Have you ever
watched or read something that just wasn’t good? It’s not necessarily that it was bad, it just
wasn’t good. You just didn’t enjoy it. I remember watching Adam Sandler’s Punch
Drunk Love when I was in college. If
you’ve never heard of it, you’re better off for that. It’s a dark comedy about a socially awkward
guy falling in love. It was awful. The credits rolled and all of us gathered in
my friend’s living room watching it looked around at each other and as almost
the same time said, “We can’t have that two hours of life back.” I remember reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
when I was growing up. A book combining
science fiction and medieval adventure should have been an easy winner. It was all I could do to not put it down and
find something better to read. If I
wasn’t such a perfectionist about finishing books I probably would have. The thing about reading a book or watching a movie
that isn’t good is that you can always just walk out. There are some stories, though, that are
harder to ignore.
“So we are always confident and know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. In fact, we are confident, and we would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
So we have this guarantee in a future hope and resurrection that will make meaningful all the struggles and trials we face in this life. We have a down payment on this future joy in the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts and bringing to bear the various fruits of the Spirit. Because of this, Paul says this weird thing about being away from the Lord and then being with the Lord. What does he mean?
In this final part of our Christmas series, The Characters of Christmas, we look at Joseph, Jesus’ earthly father. What can we learn to him? How about what to do when life takes a sudden left turn on us? Joseph’s perfect plans were thrown into chaos by the news of Mary’s unexpected pregnancy. How did he handle it? Keep reading to find out.
When Life Turns Left
Don’t you love a
good plot twist? I sure do. The best movies and TV shows always have that
moment that leaves you going, “Whoa! I
did not see that coming!” When I was in
high school and college, one of the directors who was the very best at creating
those kinds of moment was M. Night Shyamalan.
Two films in particular do this better than just about any other show
I’ve seen (and I think I can talk about these because they’ve been out long
enough you’ve either seen them or you’re not going to see them). The first was The Sixth Sense with Bruce
Willis and Haley Joel Osment. Osment
plays a young boy with the ability to see and interact with people who have
died. Willis plays a therapist who is
trying to help him work through the fear and emotions of his unique
ability. The movie is filled with
moments of heart-stopping suspense as Osment’s character navigates his
frightening world. But the real “whoa”
moment comes right at the end, after Willis helps Osment figure out that the
various dead people are coming to him to help them resolve some unresolved
tension from before their death, and that with his help they can find peace and
leave him alone. The climax comes as we
realize that Willis was one of these
dead people all along who had come to Osment for help. The moment is so jarring that people still
talk about it almost 20 years later.
This week we kick off a new teaching series called, The Characters of Christmas, designed to get us ready to experience the incredible Christmas story as fully as we possibly can. The Christmas story is a real story filled with real people. Just like they all had a place in the story, so do we. Let’s look at what place they had to see what our own might be.
A Life of Faith
I wish I could have been there at the birth. It would have been incredible. Now, I’ll tell you straight up that nothing could even come close to comparing with the births of my own sons, but this one would have come pretty far down that road. The couple had been trying to have kids for so long they’d stopped counting. Then, it finally happened. They finally got there. They finally got to experience the joy and wonder of delivering a healthy, precious baby into this world. They were able to hold in their arms this tiny miracle from God. The shouts of joy in the room would have nearly drowned out the healthily screaming baby. The mother was crying with wonder and relief as she looked into the face of her infant son. It had not been an easy journey by any stretch of the imagination, but she had made it. And her husband was standing there with her, silently watching the events unfold just exactly as he had hoped they would.
The Nexus 