Tag: Resurrection

Morning Musing: 2 Corinthians 5:2-3

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“Indeed, we groan in this tent, desiring to put on our heavenly dwelling, since, when we have taken it off, we will not be found naked.”‬‬ (CSB – Read the chapter) 

One of the currently popular shows on the Discovery Channel is called Naked and Afraid. Admittedly, I’ve never watched it, but from the constant ads for it I’ve seen while watching various other shows on the network, the premise seems to be that one or two people have been dropped off somewhere rugged and remote and have to survive for some amount of time using nothing but a single personal item and their wits. Also, that single personal item is the onlything they have with them. Thus the title of the show. The only thing the ads have convinced me of beyond the show’s total lack of entertainment value is that I don’t think surviving in the wild is supposed to work like that. 

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Morning Musing: 2 Corinthians 5:1

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“For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” (ESV – Read the chapter)

What happens when we die? There aren’t many questions that people both don’t want to ask out loud, but about which they are less curious than that one. There are many, many stories about folks who have died, experienced something, and then come back to life vividly remembering what they saw. These can be encouraging, confusing, and just plain wild, but they don’t give us a very firm foundation. What can we actually say with confidence? 

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Telling Our Story

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Yesterday was Resurrection Sunday!  We celebrated our risen Lord together by telling the incredible story of which we can be a part if we will receive Him as our Lord.  We celebrated our part in this great story as individuals, but also as a whole community as we finally put together the three key pieces of our identity into one clear and compelling idea: First Baptist is a place where people can connect to grow in Christ and reach out for His kingdom.  Keep reading to see how this all unfolded.

 

Telling Our Story

Three weeks ago, we started a journey together.  It was a journey that came out of a conversation about who we are as a church; what our God-given identity is.  The idea here is that while each individual person has a unique, God-designed identity, so do whole churches.  The church is the body of Christ and we are individually members of it.  That means we each have a specific role to play in the body, but one local church does not by itself comprise the whole body of Christ.  That means that each individual local church is itself part of the larger body of Christ and thus has a specific role to play as a community in that larger body. Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: John 20:28

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“Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!'”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

Thomas has been affixed for centuries with the rather unfortunate moniker, “Doubting Thomas,” because of his entirely justifiable disbelief of the other disciples when they reported to him that they had seen the risen Lord Jesus.  He is held out as a model of the kind of doubt-filled faith that believers should want to avoid.  Nobody wants to be like Thomas.  And yet, given the trajectory of his life and confession from that point forward, perhaps that is not such a fair assessment as he actually deserves. Read the rest…

Morning Musings: 1 Corinthians 15:35-36

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“But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised?  With what kind of body do they come?’  You foolish person!  What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

The whole idea of the resurrection is a big one.  It’s a huge one.  It’s beyond what we can really understand.  We get resuscitation.  We get reanimation.  The latter is a pretty popular pop culture genre right now.  But resurrection?  That’s something new.  At least, it was in first century Corinth.  So, naturally, people who were culturally trained to be skeptical of theologies and philosophies that seemed to glorify the material over the spiritual as the Christian doctrine of the resurrection seemed to do began to ask some hard questions.   Read the rest…