Tag: Peace

Morning Musing: Romans 5:1

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“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When was the last time you were at odds with someone you loved? If you are married, when was the last time you and your spouse were not on good terms with each other? That’s a miserable feeling. Even if you’re not in the wrong, living with a relational divide is no fun at all. You long for things to be right again. The longer the divide persists, you start to find yourself looking to other places to get the emotional and relational needs that were satisfied by the relationship when it was working. You just want peace again. Here, as we begin the next major part of Paul’s exploration of the Gospel, he tells us how we can have peace with God. You don’t want to miss this.

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Signs and Wonders

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When you set about playing the long game toward a goal that is not going to be fast or easy to achieve, sometimes you go through seasons when things seem so messy that they couldn’t possibly allow you to go any further. These seasons can be incredibly discouraging. We want to just quit and go home. Thankfully, our God specializes in accomplishing His plans in seasons just like this. He’s always been committed to playing the long game, and He’s really good at it. Let’s look today at a story from Israel’s past when He did just that, and along the way gave some pointers to what His bigger and better plans always were.

Signs and Wonders

Do you remember doing the science project in elementary school where you grew a lima bean seed to a sprout in a ziploc bag with a wet paper towel in it? I think I did that one two or three times growing up. You put the seed in the bag next to the wet paper towel, leave it in some sunlight, and in a few days you can watch as the seed splits open and a little sprout begins to push its way out. Those particular seeds are chosen because they don’t take long to grow and kids aren’t typically known to be terribly patient scientists. They also get distracted easily. I think that by the time mine had grown only a few inches long, I was ready to toss it and move on to something else. 

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Keep Calm and…Fulfill Your Ministry

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For the past two weeks, we have been talking about how to find peace in a world that is insane with sin. We’ve talked about the importance of reorienting our thinking on God through prayer and of engaging more intentionally and consistently with the Scriptures to give us the path we need to be following. In this last part, we are going to talk about one more essential thing that is all about putting these first two into practice. When we want to find a path through the messiness of the world around us, here’s what we should be doing.

Keep Calm and…Fulfill Your Ministry

As smart as the good folks in Hollywood are when it comes to producing entertainment, they really never know when a particular film is going to be a smashing success and when it will totally flop. For instance, there was a movie last year called Babylon that featured the A-list talent of Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie along with a budget of north of $100 million. It was perhaps the single biggest box office bomb of the last several years. A few years ago, though, Disney struck absolute gold with its smash hit, Frozen. A fun story combined with tremendous music made it the single most successful Disney animated film ever…right up until Frozen 2 came out, which beat it by almost $200 million. By most accounts and in spite of the box office numbers, Frozen 2 wasn’t ever quite as good as the original (sequels almost never are), but there was one song that really caught my attention. 

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A Firm Anchor

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If we are going to find peace in a world that has gone mad, we’re definitely going to need to reorient our thinking and turn to prayer, but while those two things are necessary, they aren’t sufficient on their own. We need something more. In this next part of our journey and through the lens of Paul’s second letter to Timothy, we are going to talk about what this something more is. Thanks for reading and sharing.

A Firm Anchor

One of the saddest moments in all of film history was when Chuck lost Wilson. If that’s not ringing any bells, a bit of a reminder may be due. The Chuck I’m talking about is Chuck Noland. If that’s still not ringing any bells, that doesn’t really surprise me. His name doesn’t matter very much and in fact I couldn’t have told you what it was until I looked it up. Wilson, though, just goes by Wilson. He’s white, male, a little round, and wears a handprint on his face. Actually, the handprint is his face. You see, Wilson is a volleyball. Actually, he’s a great deal more than that to Chuck whom you may recognize now as the character played by Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway. After surviving a plane crash and landing on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific, Hanks manages to survive by cobbling together what he needs from the various packages his FedEx plane dropped in the crash and which washed up on shore. One of these packages held Wilson who offered Hanks what was perhaps his most important survival tool: a relationship. I mean, Wilson didn’t actually have any lines in the film, but by giving Hanks’ character the ability to have the illusion of a relationship, it enabled him not to completely lose his sanity during his terrible sojourn. 

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A Thorough Reorientation

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Our world is a mess. What’s more, it seems to be getting messier by the day. And these aren’t merely just a bunch of small messes. They are bigger and more complicated messes than what it feels like we’ve faced in a very long time. In the midst of all of this, it is easy to give in to the constant pull we feel to anxiety and despair. Peace is absent from the scene. How can we fix this? How can we find peace in a world that seems to have gone crazy? For the next three weeks, that is a question we are tackling together in a new teaching series called, Peace in a World Gone Mad. With some help from the apostle Paul, we are going to be talking about how we can enjoy the peace of God in the midst of circumstances that seem anything but peaceful. If you have been struggling of late with the state of the world, this is a series you won’t want to miss. Thanks for reading and sharing.

A Thorough Reorientation

Have you ever looked up into the night sky and just thought, “Wow!” One thing about living where we do is that there isn’t nearly the amount of light pollution at night that you have when you get closer to the city. I can’t tell you how many times we have been sitting out after the sun goes down around our fire pit and just marveled together at the wonder of the night sky. The other night we looked out after dark and you could clearly see three planets shining in the sky in addition to all the stars. It was pretty spectacular. 

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