Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I've pastored a very rural church for well over a decade. Our town has about 1,000 people and will never grow until Jesus returns. 38 people attend our worship on Sundays. Here's a quick list of what we’ve done to grow our church, and what I’ve done to survive pastorally.…
Thanks for sharing so honestly about your current crisis of creativity. I totally understand and relate to that; it’s happened many times in my musical life thus far, and I’ve begun to accept it as a normal rhythm of the creative process. I actually went through a serious dry spell…
The Broken Stones of Israel At Sinai, the tablets of the Law of Moses were broken and restored. The Old Testament is a history of “new covenants,” including that promised in Jeremiah and fulfilled in Zechariah. Ultimately, the vertical Oath and the horizontal Sanctions met in the death of Jesus…
Woe to the sinful nation. Woe to those who enlarge their estates and build their portfolios. Woe to the drunks. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil. Woe to the proud who are wise in their own eyes. Woe to Congressmen who pass unjust laws and to…
The interpretation of Romans 7:7-25 is notoriously difficult. Good scholars disagree on many aspects of the passage, but the central interpretative difficulty concerns the identity of the “I.” Is Paul referring to himself? Is Paul referring to himself pre- or post-conversion? Does the “I” refer to Adam? Is the “I”…
You board the Metra train at Arlington Heights station one afternoon, heading to downtown Chicago for some sight-seeing. As the train departs from the station, a man in jeans, a striped t-shirt, and a Kansas City Royals baseball cap enters your train car, and begins asking to see each passenger’s…
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Responding to my earlier post on memory, Wes Callihan writes: “We can’t always go back to the physical surroundings; that’s the problem. We can, however, go back in our imaginations and it seems that that was what the classical art of memory (the ‘palace of memory’) was all about. A…
INTRODUCTION Nowhere in the Bible do we find as many references to demons as in the gospels. When Jesus arrives, Satan begins an all-out assault, and this provokes the great conflict at the center of history: Satan and his demons against the Spirit-filled son of David. THE TEXT “Then one…
Matthew 12:8: For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. The Sabbath is an institution, a rule, a commandment, a marker of time, a social practice that distinguishes Jews from Gentiles. It is also a basic structure of human history. The creation week begins with the creation of…
Jesus knows how to confront. He issues a series of eight woes against the Pharisees and scribes, and they are very severe. When He is challenged, He often raises the stakes instead of qualifying himself. He knows what it’s like to attack and not back down. In our sermon text,…
Stephen Kern suggestively notes that Bergson, Proust, and Freud, who all “insisted that the past was an essential source of the full life,” had Jewish backgrounds, and he doesn’t think this an accident: “Both Judaism and Christianity share a reverence for the past and argue their validity partly from tradition.…
I rush out of my library, resolutely intending to tell something to my wife in the next room. When I get there, my intention is gone. I go back to the library, and find the memory of what I wanted to say, undulating lightly in the air. Augustine wanted to…
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