-
Addressing Anger
Preface Preaching is about proclaiming what God said, and it expects the hearer to respond. In order to keep God’s words and intentions at the forefront, when I preach I always choose a passage to unpack rather than a topic to survey. However, on this occasion, when the pastor encouraged me to ask God what I should preach on, instead of a passage, I was drawn to the topic of anger. After extensive biblical research, I concluded that the passage that most directly addressed this subject was found in Matthew 5:17–30. However, I still used quite a few other passages to unpack what Jesus was saying, so it still felt…
-
Zechariah’s Story of Grace
Preface Preaching is one of my favorite forms of teaching. I love meditating on a passage and trying to discern the best way to communicate what God has said. I think there is something unique about preaching on a Sunday morning: the whole congregation gathered to sit under the Word together. I don’t see it as an optional activity—even though it may look different in different cultures and circumstances. When we listen to the Bible as a church family, we are united and refreshed. Typically, I don’t share my sermons. I make them available for those who are interested, but I normally don’t draw attention to them. This is for…
-
Lessons Learned on a Sunday Night
I’ve been teaching off and on for nearly 20 years now, which is such an odd thought to me. It makes me sound old. Even though I can look back fondly on a great many of the lessons and series I’ve taught, I still have times where things don’t go as planned. My most recent church series was one of them. And as one of my seminary profs liked to say, it’s not experience that matters, it’s evaluated experience that really counts. So I’d like to share with you what I learned in my most recent experience. The Setup The subject of study was modern identity. I was excited about…
-
Good Friday: Meditations from Genesis
Last year was so busy, I confess that I didn’t celebrate holidays all that deeply. This year I’m determined to make more of the time. Today is Good Friday, and while it’s not the first significant day in what some call Holy Week, it is one of the biggest. Christmas gets more attention because the holiday has come to celebrate much more than Jesus’s birth. Easter isn’t celebrated quite as much these days, but we still have our sanitized festivities to share with our neighbors. But I’ve never known Good Friday to get much attention outside of Christian circles, and frankly, I’m grateful. There are no gifts today, no candy,…
-
Reading the Bible in 2021
I have a confession to make: I have never read the Bible in a year. And I know it sounds wrong, but I don’t plan to do it this year, either. The Bible in a year. It’s a popular New Year’s resolution, and I think I may have tried to do it once back in college. The thing of it is, I just don’t want to rush. Is that bad? There are some books worth speed reading, and for me, this is not one of them. Maybe if I read it through more often, I could read it faster without missing something. But as it stands now, this is an…