partsofspeaking

 In 2017 I published this book . I read some of it today. It holds up, and it's some of my better work. God put it on my heart to write it. I don't publish Bible studies unless they really are from that place. I encourage you to check it out for a personal or group study. The photo is of the Kindle version. The paperback is beige.

Why did Christ die on the cross? This might seem like a simple, even redundant question, but it isn’t. He died to restore justice and order to the natural order, which includes humankind. Romans 8. He died to complete the Messianic prophecies, although that is disputed by those of Jewish faith.   Isaiah 53. He died to rise victorious over death, Christus Victorious. He had to die to rise and be the first fruits. I Corinthians 15 He died to be an example to those who would follow Him.   More a traditional idea than one in the Scriptures, but Hebrews 12 may be referenced here. He died as a penal substitution, to pay the final price for humanity’s sins. The sacrifices of the Old Testament (and in some ways, those of other cultures) were pictures of this embedded need for payment for sin, but they were ineffective, weak, only shadows really. Romans 3. All of these are true, and there are other “reasons.” I would recommend John Piper’s book on this subject. But....

For most of my Christian experience, which is at the 50-year mark since I was baptized on April 11, I have heard the analogy of faith being like trusting a chair.  I always thought it was dumb. I am reminded of all the textbook renditions of Plato's Cave and his view of reality, and how often they used chair as the example. "In 'Heaven' there is a perfect chair, and all the chairs on earth are shadows of the perfect chair" it went. I often quipped that Heaven must be like a big furniture warehouse.  Sitting on a chair is hardly analogous to giving your life to the care and control of a Supreme Being. I mean, you can see the chair, and if you wanted, you could test the chair before sitting. Of course, we rarely, rarely do. We just plop, or glide, or lower ourselves gracefully into the chair, depending on the type.  But I'm rethinking it.  Yesterday I went to the "young people's service" at church. It's not all young people, but it's a serv...

Over the past twenty or thirty years, there have been a lot of gerund books about God: Loving God, Obeying God, Experiencing God, Believing God (a la Beth Moore). There are probably books on this--a check shows variation--Following God.  Jesus told his disciples, "Follow me." As much believe me, love me, obey me.  The concept demands our attention, if he said it so much, for example, nine times in the book of Matthew.    (You will find love me, believe me, and obey me in the gospels, but not "experience me." I'm still not sure what that means, since God is the Supreme Being, not an experience, but I digress.) To follow requires sight, sound, and activity. Vision, hearing, and movement. Eyes, ears, and feet.  When the disciples followed, they left nets and taxation tables, their ways of making a living; illness and deformity; security and wealth; degradation and demon-possession.  They started by stopping.  They took another path. They had to see t...

 Sometimes they are lame and ridiculous, but this one works: https://babylonbee.com/news/is-the-apocalypse-nigh-15-signs-to-look-for

Twitter is a cesspool. There are, apparently, hundreds of thousands of people on Twitter whose only job or mission or purpose in life is to find the tweets of Christian leaders and harass them.  That said, what is a Christian leader, anyway?

I like to link articles I find interesting. Here is one from The Atlantic , my go-to secular magazine.  I don't agree with everything in this article, but every parent of a young girl should recognize that their daughters live and will live in a culture where violence toward women, and disrespect of them for their bodies, their beauty, their plainness, their size, their curves, their weight, and so on, by men of all ages, is justified (by that I mean they get away with it, not that it's right). While I do believe women can make sensible decisions (i.e., not dancing in their underwear at a window, as one of her examples), women do not have to be provocative in their clothing or actions to be victims of harassment or violence. In fact, they rarely are There are lots of binaries here: women are harassed for being attractive, and for being unattractive, but in different ways. In both situations, the core issue is that some men and boys think they have the right to do so. Another bi...

I am reading Dane Ortlund’s book, Gentle and Lowly ,  on this Good Friday.  "Our natural intuition can only give us a God like us. The God revealed in the Scripture deconstructs our intuitive predilections and startles us with one whose infinitude of perfections is match b his infiniite of gentleness. Indeed, his perfections include his perfection gentleness. (By gentleness Ortlund focuses on kindness.) I like what he is writing but I hope he gets into the context of these verses, because context always matters. The context is 1. Messengers come from John; 2. Judgments pronounced on the cities of the Galilee for not responding to the miracles and message; 3. A discourse on His intimate relationship with the Father. Then "Come unto me, all you who labor and are heavy laden." And definitely we are, as His hearers then were. In light of His power and deity, come. He's the one who has the right to make that invitation. I wonder if Ortlund has an agend...