(26 minutes) Go into any “Christian” bookstore and you will find many books on the “end times” and the “last things”—books on the Rapture, heaven and hell, the Second Coming, the Last Judgment, and Armageddon as well as books with charts predicting the order and nature of what will come… Continue reading
(22 minutes) Around 760 BCE in a small, insignificant village in Judah, a most monumental event occurred. A shepherd was called by God to prophesy in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. This shepherd did not belong to any of the prophetic guilds—in other words, he had no “professional” training. But… Continue reading
I have been asked why John wrote his message using such bizarre and confusing symbols. If his point was to communicate the spiritual, life and death struggle between Rome and the church/between Caesar and Christ, then why didn’t he just say that in ways that are easy for us to understand? Continue reading
(12 minutes) Are you ever haunted by the question, “Who am I?” It is a human question, and it is a question of practical theology. Who are we, really? As Christians we make a lot of claims for our faith – for the effectiveness of God’s salvation – for the… Continue reading
(12 minutes) I don’t think that we will have discovered America until we have some sense of the feelings of the natives that walked over this place. And the people that were the furthest from understanding the sense of the natives that walked over this place were the conquerors of… Continue reading
(a 14 minute podcast) So far in the sermon series on John 3:16-17, we have demonstrated that the whole premise behind the Good News is “For God so loved the world.” We have also defined eternal life in a way that is true to the New Testament. And we have… Continue reading
a 9-minute podcast In the second sermon of this series on John 3:16, we discovered that the focus of eternal life in the New Testament is not on how long it lasts (although it lasts forever)—the focus is on the quality of life. Eternal life is a life lived in… Continue reading
(a 14-minute podcast) If God sent God’s Son into this world so that we might have eternal life, then it’s absolutely crucial that we understand what John meant by “eternal life.” Now you might think that the answer is obvious. Perhaps you grew up with the same understanding of eternal… Continue reading
(a 13-minute podcast) John 3:16 is like the Lord’s Prayer—we all know it, but our very familiarity with this verse hides its profound message. We think we know what it means because we hear and interpret it through the theology we’ve grown up with. But I am convinced that the… Continue reading
God is best experienced as we reach out in compassion and love to others, especially those who are disenfranchised and discounted in our culture. If Jesus was correct in presenting a God who has proclaimed divine solidarity with “the least of these” of our world, then it’s natural to expect that we will find God best as we touch others in God’s healing and liberating name. Continue reading
