The passage in front of us today reads like a romance novel with a twist of action-packed drama. It is kind of like a Hallmark romance movie meets a good old fashioned Clint Eastwood revenge western.
Continue readingIt has been said that you can learn a lot about a person when they are enduring intense pressure. Take away a person’s job, spouse, kids, reputation, belongings, or any other number of things that we hold dear, and you will learn a lot about the inner workings of that person’s heart. Suffering has a tendency to squeeze us like grapes, until something oozes out.
Continue readingHow do you endure suffering? How do you resist the urge to tap out, give up, and throw in the towel? How do you resist the urge to lash out or fall into sin when you face suffering of different kinds?
Continue readingAs we dive into the passage before us today, I think it is important to see David as a servant as he serves a city who is under attack from the enemy, and as he subsequently serves that same city by leaving when he learns that his enemy, Saul, is about to attack the city because David is there. Serving God’s people is not for the faint of heart. It requires grit and grace.
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There are four movements in our text today. Jesus’ disciples find the tomb empty (vv. 1 – 12). Jesus joins a couple of the disciples on their way to the city of Emmaus and has a conversation with them about himself (vv. 13 – 35). Jesus then joins the rest of his disciples for some more conversation about himself along with some food (vv. 36 – 49). And then in the final movement, Jesus ascends back to Heaven (vv. 50 – 53).
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My job this evening, as we come to the end of our time together, is to guide us through the final moments of Jesus’ life as he is murdered through crucifixion, dies and is buried in a dark tomb. Death is never pretty. It is ugly. It is confusing. And it is often horrifying – especially in the case of Jesus.
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Today is Palm Sunday. Every year on this day, we celebrate what the Bible calls, The Triumphal Entry. This is the day when Jesus rode into Jerusalem after three years of miraculously healing the sick, proclaiming freedom for the spiritually oppressed, preaching the establishment of the kingdom of God, picking fights with the religious establishment, and generally creating his own death sentence.
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Here we are, in week ten of our study on what it means to be the church. When I and our other leaders first envisioned this series, we wanted to press pause on the series we were in in 1 Samuel so that we could intentionally hit the reset button for us as a church.
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This is week nine of our series entitled “The Family”. In this series we have been studying the Bible to see what it means to be the church and to see what God has called the church to do. Over the course of this series we have talked about making disciples, being devoted to God, learning to become more generous, becoming united, being the gifts that God has designed us to be, speaking truth in love, and pursuing transformation together in the context of biblical community.
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Over the next two weeks we will be studying what it means to be holy. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that God would call his church to be holy. In fact, this is made explicitly clear in verses 15 – 16 of our text where it says, “as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’” If you claim to be a Christian, to be a member of God’s bride, the church, then you are called to be holy just as your bridegroom is holy himself.
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