Every few years I find myself writing about this subject. It is one that I care about very deeply, and with each year of ministry experience that I gain the more I learn about the realities of young people leaving the church. This is a problem that is not secluded to one denomination of Christianity […]
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The Limitations of the Judges of Israel
God delights in using weak people. God does not just use the popular, rich, handsome, talented, and prestigious; He uses the lowly, injured, and untalented. This is a theme that is clearly seen in the book of Judges. What were some of the limitations of the judges of Israel? Let’s quickly examine it today: Ehud […]
What If Jesus Did Not Rise From The Dead?
I want you to use your imagination. Today I want to imagine that everything about Easter is the same. We are in church celebrating Easter. We go about our church day the same way we would in our real world. The only difference is, in our imagination, Jesus DID NOT rise from the dead. We […]
Daniel’s ‘Model’ Prayer
First, let me welcome Kreig back to the “blogosphere”! Last week Kreig wrote a great post on the Jewish “tefillah”. This sparked a conversation between Kreig and I about how differently the Old Testament saints prayed than we do today. They had a grasp on the nature of prayer and also on the nature of […]
Lessons in Prayer From the Jewish Tefillah
Recently I’ve been diving into studies on the ancient Jewish context of the Old Testament, especially the Torah. We often read the first five books of the Bible in a bit of a vacuum. We read them (and in the case of Leviticus, we skim them) in order to make it through a yearly Bible reading schedule. We engage with the action-packed stories, but our eyes tend to gloss over at the more difficult passages that depict parts of ancient near-eastern culture that are entirely alien to us. As I have read about the patterns of Jewish life in ancient Israel, some things have stuck out to me like signal flares begging to be seen.
3 Things To Do When God Seems Far Away
In the book of Esther we see that Esther and Mordecai are in a strange land filled with wickedness. God seemed very far away from them, especially as they were strangers in the Medo-Persian Empire as a punishment for their sins as a nation. God seemed so far, in fact, that Esther is the […]