This Psalm 131 sermon I preached on 7/10/16 may help dial down the volume of the internal noise of your own mind. Amid the Coronavirus, many are awake in the night with noisy thoughts of one sort or another. Psalm…
What is a legitimate basis for asking for God’s blessing?
Psalm 67 describes the right sort of motivation for praying for God’s blessing.* Nearly every week, I close our services at The Red Brick Church in Stillman Valley with a biblical benediction that is thousands of years old: “The LORD…
The Jesus Storybook Bible on the Hope of Christians
The final pages of The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name: One day, John knew, Heaven would come down and mend God’s broken world and make it our true, perfect home once again. And he knew, in some…
Why?
In the context of life’s most difficult moments, we want to know “why?” We might at as well ask to to pluck the planet Mars from the heavens between our thumb and forefinger and flatten it between our hands like…
Sing Psalm 118 In Anticipation of Palm Sunday and Holy Week
Psalm 118, with its repeated hopeful refrain that the LORD’s steadfast love endures forever, is important during Holy Week because: The crowds quoted Psalm 118 during the Triumphal Entry when they cried “hosanna” (Matthew 21:9, Mark 11:9-10). Jesus infuriated the…
The Danger of Cherry-Picking Only Praises from the Psalms
Suffering with incurable cancer, J. Todd Billings points out that contemporary hymnals tend to have a far smaller proportion of laments than the book of Psalms does (Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ, 40). While psalms…
Incurable Cancer and the Problem of Good
Suffering with incurable cancer, J.T. Billings points out that the way we see and interpret life must account for goodness and beauty as well as suffering. J. Todd Billings is a theologian who has been diagnosed with incurable cancer. In…
Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ
I haven’t yet read Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ, but I’ve ordered it. J. Todd Billings, the Gordon H. Girod Research Professor of Reformed Theology at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, describes his…
Resurrection: When Everything Sad Becomes Untrue
The hope of the resurrection is the sure promise that, for the believer, all that is sad and hurts will become untrue. These quotes help us meditate on our blessed hope. From The Lord of the Rings series: “Gandalf! I…
John Frame: The Great Question Confronting Modern Humanity
Which is fundamental to reality: persons or impersonal structures? Your answer to this question determines whether you see life as a great, beautiful adventure, or if you are living in a gray world of particle collisions. You will have to…