“But know this: Hard times will come in the last days.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
The latest Marvel offering, Secret Invasion, is already in its second week and absolutely fantastic so far. My mind is racing with all the Gospel possibilities of the story. I had thought about writing down some early series reflections today, but I’m going wait a few more weeks until the series ends to offer up my thoughts on it. Instead for today, I recently had a conversation with a good friend who was expressing some spiritual and moral concern with the state of our culture. As he looks around at the world, he sees a nation awash in sin and getting worse. You may see that too. Here are some of the thoughts I shared with him. Perhaps they’ll be helpful for you as well.
“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; grief, crying, and pain will be no more, because the previous things have passed away.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
What would you do if you could suddenly go back in time at a point some of your biggest tragedies in life unfolded? The answer to that seems fairly obvious: you’d do whatever you could do to change them so they didn’t ever happen. We all have things from the past we would change if we got the chance. This is an awareness that can become a desire which, if we’re not careful, can become a fixation that keeps us from moving forward in the present. Dwelling in the past turns out to be far more dangerous than it seems. A recent series from the Hallmark Channel explores all of this and more. Let’s talk today about The Way Home.
As we prepare to enter into the new year together, many of us are thinking toward the future. What does it hold? Will we be able to handle what is coming at us? Those are big questions, but as followers of Jesus, all of them must necessarily fall subject to what His plans for us are. In the New Year’s sermon, we took some time together to talk about how to move into the future with the kind of attitude that will see the most Gospel advances happen in the world around us. Enjoy.
Fueled by Boldness
Have you ever made a really bold ask before? A woman named Demi Skipper did and she wound up with a house for her efforts. After watching a Ted Talk by Kyle MacDonald, a Canadian man who started with a paperclip and traded his way up to a house, Demi decided she was going to try the same thing. She started with a single bobby pin and began trading. After offering to trade that bobby pin for pretty much whatever anyone was interested in trading for it, she eventually found a woman willing to trade her a pair of earrings for it. These earrings became a couple of margarita glasses, and the race was on. Demi traded her way through a snowboard, a MacBook laptop computer, various other pieces of jewelry, a Peloton stationary exercise bike, three tractors, a celebrity card at Chipotle, which entitles the holder to free food, a solar-powered trailer home, and finally a small house in Clarkston, TN where she and her husband will relocate to from San Francisco. Not a bad deal. Sure, the taxes are a little higher on a house than a bobby pin, but it’ll serve them a few more purposes including giving Demi a home base from which to attempt the whole thing again with the goal in mind of giving the house away to a family in need. She documented her entire adventure on TikTok.
“Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.” (ESV – Read the chapter)
Have you ever longed for the “good old days”? Why? What about them did you desire? Simpler times? Different social interactions? Fewer burdens? No social media?
I have come to the conclusion that one of the major false gods of our culture is called Nostalgia. The thing about Nostalgia, though, is that he is subtle. No one realizes they are worshiping him at first, and even if you were to point it out to them, they’d just respond, “No, I’m not. I’m just reminiscing about the way things were.”
And yet, this is what the worship of Nostalgia looks like. We come to his altar and offer sacrifices of time and memory. We offer cynicism about the current state of the world. We offer judgments of people who are younger than we are. In return, he gives us warm feelings about the past that are a comforting salve for the pressures of the present. Read the rest…
The Nexus 