Jesus tells the story of a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho who falls into the hands of robbers. The text reads, “They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.”
Crunk rap artist Lil Jon and DJ Snake have a top 10 single dedicated to the hook, “Turn down for what.” Since I was a bit out of touch with the language, I embarrassingly asked some teenagers what it meant.
God is a God of the ordinary. He does the miraculous through ordinary means. He uses ordinary people and simple methods to accomplish his divine goals.
There are far too many who have a theology that is full of it. Perhaps that’s a bit crude, but the facade that people often create under the guise of theology is astounding.
Nothing clears a room faster than the word sin.
Sin. Sin. Sin. Sin. Sin. That’s all you Christians talk about and we’re sick of it. We don’t need it. We don’t want it. And we don’t believe in it anyway. So says the culture in 21st-century America.
If you’ve been on this blog for any period of time, you’ve likely come to realize that I want to talk theology in the language of ordinary, everyday people. I’m not afraid of complex doctrine or difficult church-language, but when I communicate the ancient truths of the Scriptures, I want the 30-year old dad to understand how this theology affects the way he does his work, loves his wife, and cares for his children.
There’s a legend about an African tribe called the Himba.
In this tribe each child has a unique song. When a tribe learns that a woman is pregnant, the tribe will go out into the wilderness and come back with a song that is unique to the child in the womb.
Vocation, which commonly in our culture, refers to a person’s job is actually rooted in significant theological roots. Vocation, which comes from the latin vocatio, literally refers to God’s calling.
I read a ridiculous amount of blogs and listen to a ton of sermons. While there is certainly no shortage of availability of blogs to be reading or podcasts to subscribe to, over the past year a number of new voices have really become prominent in my feeds.
We recently went on a magical vacation with our family to Disney World. After the vacation we were talking to some of our friends about the experience and they asked, “How did you do it?”
It’s the beginning of a new year and that has me thinking about goals, ideas, and dreams. Some of those goals are personal and others of those are directly related to this little place here on the web.
Every year as we decorate the house to celebrate the Christmas season, I always make sure to get my menorah and put it out on the mantle. I usually also tell my wife that we should put it in the window so people can see, but I haven’t been able to convince her yet.
Every December, the warriors prepare themselves for the battle over Christmas. Loyal Christians fight the good fight by refusing to say, “Happy Holidays.” Others go to battle defending our right to call our trees “Christmas trees” instead of holiday trees.
Church people love to count numbers. And sometimes it even becomes a disturbing obsession to count everything. The numbers game is often one of the things that drives me crazy when I attend conferences; shortly after meeting another pastor, you are quickly asked, “How big is your church?”