“When the Lord has given you rest from your pain and turmoil and the hard service with which you were made to serve, you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon: ‘How the oppressor has ceased, the insolent fury ceased!'” (ESV – Read the chapter)
At first blush here, it feels a little odd that God would call Israel to taunt Babylon when they are brought low in judgment from the Lord. Isn’t that just cruel? Why kick someone when they are down? This Old Testament god here must be the vengeful, gleeful-in-wrath god we’ve always heard about from our critics. Read the rest…
In this final part of the teaching series, A Word on Reality, we at last wrap up John’s masterful letter. In the end we find a strong reaffirmation of God’s testimony about Jesus and a final call to live comfortably within the borders of reality. It is only there that we will find the life for which we most long. Keep reading for more.
A Final Word on Reality
Well, we have finally reached the end of our journey through 1 John. And what a journey it has been! We have come a long way and have covered a lot of ground since the beginning of July. Some of it has been very encouraging and some has been pretty hard-hitting. What I have tried my best to do, though, throughout this series is to leave you with a clear outline of the boundaries of reality. Surely not all of this life is black and white, but life according to the law of the kingdom is a simple thing. It’s not easy, but it is simple: believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God and act in the light of that belief in every circumstance of your life. Piece of cake, right? Let’s be real here—that is, after all, what all of this has been about. Reality is rarely a breeze, but it is always right. And the call of not only this letter, but of our entire lives is to live in God’s reality, not the world’s fantasy. Before finishing out the letter this morning, let’s look back over where we’ve been so everything is fresh. Read the rest…
Yesterday morning in our journey through 1 John we finally got to the point of defining love. What is love and what are the five implications for getting it right in our lives that John outlines? Keep reading to find out.
Love Flows Out
Near the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus looked at the crowd gathered around Him and said this: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” Read the rest…
This week as we continued in the third part of our series through 1 John, A Word on Reality, we looked at how we can stand firm in the reality of God against this world’s unrelenting tide of fantasies and their ever more aggressive attempts to move in their direction. If we are going to resist the lies of this world, there is one key thing we must do. Read on to find out what it is.
A Vise-Grip on Truth
For the past couple of summers, Lisa and I have enjoyed the show “Fool Us with Penn and Teller” on the CW Network. It’s a gameshow wherein four different magicians bring their best tricks to try and fool the world-famous magician duo. The challenge is that they’ve been at it for over 40 years and know just about everything there is to know about magic and how to do it. While there are a few tricks we have been able to figure out, there are some that leave us absolutely flummoxed as to how they did it. Any really good magic trick can leave you feeling like maybe there’s more to this world than we know about. Now, of course, no magic show is any more than a cleverly disguised trick, but the intimation of something more is part of its appeal. Still, while the nod and wink of a magician is entertaining, following that rabbit all the way down its hole can lead, as Alice discovered, to more trouble than most of us would care to find. Read the rest…
This Sunday we kicked off a brand new teaching series called, “A Word on Reality.” For the next few weeks we are going to be working through 1 John and taking a close look at his invitation to be a part of the real world and what it looks like when we do. In this first part of the series we talked about what needs to happen before any movement in this direction can take place. Keep reading to find out what this is.
A Vibrant Realism
Have you ever tried to teach someone who thought they knew what you were talking about better than you did? How’d that go? It was pretty frustrating, wasn’t it? You probably kept trying to tell them one thing or another, but you could tell they weren’t really listening. Maybe they were hearing, but not listening. Then, when you sent them out to put whatever it was into practice they failed. Miserably. But then, instead of getting mad at themselves for not being a very good student, they got all upset at you for not teaching them well enough. The problem was: While they thought they were living within the bounds of reality on whatever the issue was, you knew they weren’t. But, because of their deeply ingrained false belief, they weren’t willing to listen. Have you ever been there? Read the rest…
The Nexus 