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Teaching Tip # 3
Relationship! Relationship! Relationship! From the Garden to the final judgment, God is all about relationship.Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are in perfect relationship. When God walked in the evenings with Adam and Eve in the Garden, He didn’t come to check up on His creation, He came with a desire to fellowship with the only aspect of His creation made in His image. As parents and teachers, we need to start as early as possible teaching our children to have a personal relationship with their Father God. It is too easy to teach children what they should and should not do as though they can do something to…
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Christianity is a Team Sport
“I have a relationship with the Lord, I’m still a Christian I just don’t do CHURCH anymore.” This is the frequent cry of the wandering diaspora of detached believers. There are typically two things that contribute to the lone soldier syndrome in the Christian faith: intense cultural individuality, and what many people call “church hurt.” While both are genuinely felt by many yet neither are biblical excuses to neglect “meeting together.” (Hebrew 10:24-25) I used to quote the scripture above as the only biblical reference that points to the “togetherness” of the expression of our Christian faith. But it turns out that scripture is full of references that underline the…
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WDGG? How to make GOoD Decisions!
When making decisions that can have a long-term impact on your life, it is helpful to create distinctions. I have found it of utility to look at these decisions from legal, ethical (2), and prudential distinctions (5). Furthermore, I have found it helpful to have a heuristic (i.e., a thumb rule) to provide consistency in decision-making resolution.
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Give Lots of Hugs
I just returned home from the funeral of a friend who passed away within days of going into the hospital for surgery. Although it was a serious surgery, nothing like this was expected. Sadly, this isn’t our only funeral this week. On June 30th a private plane carrying two couples and a family of four crashed, and my husband knew two of the men on it. He attended one couple’s funeral today and will go to that of the family of four on Saturday. So please give your friends and family a hug when you see them—and make it a point to be with them soon if possible. God doesn’t…
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How Not to Hate the Wait
Our pace of daily life quickens. For instance, do you remember when email emerged as a life-changing breakthrough––speeding up and expanding communication beyond what we ever imagined? Some of us older cats do. But today, many view email as an archaic nuisance, like snail mail. Why not just text or chat? In our world of one-click shopping and on-demand streaming, much of life no longer unfolds over time. We expect immediate results. We want what we want when we want it. Instantaneous life is a must. We hate waiting. Thankfully, we don’t have to wait for anything. Or do we? Yes, often God asks us to wait. But His concept…
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Unanswered Prayers
When someone dies, we struggle with the “why”. Why didn’t God answer our prayers? Why didn’t God answer the prayers of everyone else? Why was this life cut short? As Easter approaches and we solemnly remember the Last Supper and the gruesome events that unfolded, the “why” questions of the disciples are laid bare. Jesus was taken by force from the garden. He was tried for false crimes, beaten to the edge of life, and brutally hung on a cross to die in agony and ridicule. His disciples and followers watched it all. They had grown up in the Jewish tradition of prayer. And Jesus, their esteemed rabbi, taught them…
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Paul and His Subversive Passage on the Family
In the first half of the Book of Ephesians, the apostle Paul lays out the Christian’s new identity in Christ. In the second half, he provides the “so what,” or the ramifications. As he outlines what Spirit-filled living looks like (Eph. 5:18ff), he envisions a community in which people show Christ’s love by serving one another. And one of the places where such service happens is in the household—where in his day he would have found spouses, kids, and slaves under one roof. People living in the first century under Roman rule would have been familiar with instructions for respectable families known as “household codes.” These codes outlined the ideal…
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LIVING LEGACYS
Every family has a legacy. What we do in this life will mark the lives we touch. How well we live will influence how well we die. May God help us all to learn that the legacies that we are left and that we leave are not the monies or the things that are left behind but the memories, the love, and the lessons that are left within. Life is an interesting journey that many times ends the same way it began. A helpless infant depends on its family to care for its many needs. In a similar manner many elderly parents find themselves unable to meet their basic…
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The Clarity of Death
“It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart” (Ecclesiastes 7:2). My father died recently. He was always sharp, quick with a pun or a play on words, an accountant by trade who worked until he was seventy-seven years old. He was a student of the Bible for almost sixty years. He did a lot of reading, writing, and “sparring” (personal debating) over the years, quoting folks like Barnhouse and Spurgeon in the process. But dementia overtook him these last few years. He could no longer…
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No More Masks
As the days grow shorter and golden leaves fall from trees, we pack up Halloween decorations in preparation for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Although a few costumes may linger in photos on the fridge, everything else is set aside for another year. However, there’s one thing that few of us ever put away: the everyday masks we live behind. We all have masks of one sort or another. Reasons vary. For some, our masks protect us from going too deep or being too real. For others, masks allow us to live more boldly as the alter ego we espouse. Still others crave physical and…
