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A Place Where You Belong
I was provoked in my spirit the other day by some tweets from a person I only began following this year. Sometimes it is important to name names, but I’m not ready to do that at this stage. I appreciate some of what he has to say, and he was recommended by a friend from church. I even have a book he co-authored sitting in my stack of books to be read in the near future. So being new to him, I don’t know if this is his thing or if he’s gone off on a tangent, but there is a reason I don’t think it matters that you know…
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Stand in Wander, part 1: The Bible
Note: I promise not to make a habit of wonder/wander puns. I started this blog as an attempt to free myself to write and build, but apparently the space is not the problem. The problem is me. I have been convicted of late that I have practiced silence for too long. Wisdom suggested it as one conflict after another seemed to indicate peacemaking was in order. There is a fine line between peacemaking and “peace-faking,” as Ken Sande calls it. The past decade has been an increasingly precarious time for relationships, so why make things worse? Why indeed. Well, as a teacher, you really cannot afford to be silent all…
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Submitting to a Sovereign King
This fourth sermon was the follow-up to the last one, delivered the week before. It continued the story of Ahab’s life, and that led into a very difficult topic: God’s sovereignty and our responsibility. This can be especially difficult for Baptists because some of us are Calvinists and other Arminians, and we don’t always know who is who. But this is where the text led, so I tried to do justice. It helped that this was another fascinating story. The audio for this sermon was lost, but you can read the manuscript below. Delivered to First Baptist Church of Mount Pleasant, MI, on 10/19/2014. Prayer Good morning, Father. We lift…
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Ahab and the God of Mercy
For my third sermon, I began my practice of preaching on what I was studying at the time. Thankfully, this meant a return to narrative, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Unfortunately, the audio was lost, so you will have to content yourself with a manuscript. Delivered at First Baptist Church, Mount Pleasant, MI. On October 12, 2014. Introduction Our passage this morning is found in the book of 1 Kings, chapter 21, so please turn with me there. For the next two weeks, I want to examine with you the end of the life of King Ahab. He’s one of the most famous kings of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and…
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The Sin of Sodom
The other day I saw an old debate come back around: how should we think about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible? It’s common in conservative circles to think destruction came about because of rampant homosexual activity. For them, the sin of Sodom was quite simply sodomy. The “other side” then quotes a passage from Ezekiel, which says the sin was actually failing to take care of widows and orphans. For both sides, there is a tendency to think “it’s right there in the Bible! How could you get this so wrong?!” For conflicts that seem so obvious, it is perhaps all the more important to take…