Tag: Trusting in God

A Cosmic Christmas

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This week we continue our Advent series, When Heaven Met Earth. As promised, we are going to be taking in a story of Jesus’ birth that probably doesn’t fall on your radar when you think about your favorites. Yet this story, for as different as it is, may be the most important of all the stories of Jesus’ birth in terms of giving us a bigger, fuller picture of the reality of what was happening in the universe at large when God came to be with us as a baby. Read on (or listen!) as we marvel at the fact that Christmas is bigger than we realize.

A Cosmic Christmas

Paul Harvey was famous for telling “the rest of the story.” He would take a story that many people know a little bit about, and then explore some surprising or encouraging element of it that not nearly as many people knew. The combination of the creativity of his reporting with his absolutely classic voice made his stories a true delight to all those who got to hear them. Sometimes his stories introduced people he thought should be better known. Sometimes they gave details about something or someone that made it even more impressive than it already was to most people. They always left you feeling not just better informed, but encouraged about the state of the world than you were before listening to them. Harvey was doing Gospel good with his reporting. A good story that lets us see things from a different angle or a bigger picture often does that. 

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Digging in Deeper: Romans 12:19-20

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“Friends, do not avenge yourselves; instead, leave room for God’s wrath, because it is written, ‘Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay, says the Lord.’ But ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. For in so doing you will be heaping fiery coals on his head.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We’ve all been there. Someone comes along and does something that makes you mad. What’s more, they meant to do it. Now you are left with a choice: How are you going to respond? Do you get them back? Do you let it go? Do you express your displeasure in some unmistakable way? If we’re being honest, for most of us, our first instinct is to start plotting how we can get revenge in some way. That’s normal. It always has been. And if there’s no God, or if we can’t trust the gods to avenge us, that kind of thinking makes sense. But if there is a God as is revealed in the pages of the Scriptures, it doesn’t. Let’s talk about it.

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He Cares for You

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This past Sunday we celebrated Mother’s Day. Moms are a gift from God that keeps the world running far more smoothly than it would without them. But being a mom is tough these days. With that in mind, this week we are looking at a story in the Scriptures about a mom seeking to take care of her kids in a terrible situation. In this story we can find several points of encouragement and challenge for moms and all the rest of us too. Let’s dive in.

He Cares for You

Let’s get started this morning with a bit of confession time. I hope you are sitting down for this one…okay, good. I am…not a good mom. I know dads are supposed to be pretty awesome, but try as I might, I just can’t seem to hit that mark. Okay, well, if I’m being totally honest, I haven’t actually tried all that hard to hit it. When my boys need something that Lisa, my beautiful bride and their amazing mom, can do as a mom, they go to her. Every time. They don’t even give me a second thought when they need a mom thing. They just skip right past me and go to her. And get this: she does it for them. Really well (because she’s a great mom). You know, I’d almost be offended by all of this but for this one thing: I’m a dad. And dads don’t mom very well. But that’s an okay thing because God made moms. And moms are a good thing. 

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A Gift of Trust

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What do we do when everything is falling apart around us? That’s the question that Habakkuk was left to wrestle with at the end of his collection of prophecy. His circumstances weren’t great, and they were on the cusp of getting much worse. What are we supposed to do then, especially when it’s not going to be within our power to fix them? Here at the end of our journey, we finally get an answer to that question. Let’s see where Habakkuk lands in his journey with God, and talk about how we can get to the same place in our own lives.

A Gift of Trust

Do you remember the old Magic Eye books? Do you remember those images? I’ll put one up on the screen as a reminder. Believe it or not, there’s a Walleye fish and a hook in all of that gobblygook. I made the mistake of looking at one on my Facebook feed the other day (pro tip: don’t do that in public because you look really funny crossing your eyes and holding your phone up right in front of your face), and suddenly there was a new one every time I opened the app. As you can see from the Magic Eye image up here, when you look at it for the first time, there’s clearly nothing there. But once you learn how to see them and figure out what the image is, you just about can’t not see them. 

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Morning Musing: Matthew 14:1-2

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“At that time Herod the tetrarch heard the report about Jesus. ‘This is John the Baptist,’ he told his servants. “He has been raised from the dead, and that’s why miraculous powers are at work in him.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever read something in the Scriptures and wondered how on earth the author could have come to know that particular detail? We don’t encounter this much in the Old Testament, but the Gospel authors all have places where there are details reported they were present to have observed or experienced for themselves. Sometimes they report the conversations that happened in gatherings of priests that included none of Jesus’s followers when they happened. Matthew reports a private conversation between Pilate and his wife. Here he reports what was apparently a private conversation between Herod and his servants. How did they come by this knowledge? Let’s explore that briefly this morning through the lens of an interesting little connection that’s easy to miss.

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