Posts by Bob Lepine (Page 3)
SEPTEMBER 21, 2022
Dear Friends, This morning’s Wall Street Journal had an interesting review of Rina Raphael’s new book “The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus and Goop and the False Promise of Self-Care” (the review is here, but it’s behind a paywall). In the piece, Megan Cox Gurdon, who is a regular Journal contributor, agrees with the book’s author that the $4.4 trillion “Wellness Culture” industry is simply profiting from an observation G.K. Chesterton made years ago when he said that people who choose not…
SEPTEMBER 14, 2022
Dear Friends, Some of you know the name Tim Challies. For the past 20 years, Tim has been blogging at his website www.challies.com. After posting a few book reviews and some other articles on his website, Tim came to a point where he realized he either needed to stop altogether or take blogging more seriously. He set a goal of posting every day for a year. Before long, his hobby became his vocation. Today, about a million people visit his blog each…
SEPTEMBER 7, 2022
Dear Friends, Jesus reserved his strongest words, His harshest rebukes, for the self-righteous Pharisees in His day. At one point, when these legalists asked Jesus why His own disciples did not adhere to their regulations regarding hand washing, Jesus told them that they were the living embodiment of Isaiah’s prophecy in Isaiah 29:13. “You hypocrites!” Jesus said. “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in…
AUGUST 31, 2022
Dear Friends, Tonight was a big night for us at Redeemer. Twenty-seven kids were loved on, poured into and prayed for as we kicked off our very first evening of Awana. There were fun and games. There were group times where they learned about the verses they will be memorizing. By the end of the evening, everyone headed hope excited about what God has planned for these precious children this year. And maybe, Lord willing, more like them in the weeks ahead. I think what…
AUGUST 24, 2022
Dear Friends, Which have you spent more time doing this week: Grumbling? Or giving thanks? Let’s be honest. We are people who easily become accustomed to and take for granted the blessings that we enjoy in life every day. In fact, it doesn’t take long before a recuring blessing in our lives becomes an expectation, a requirement or a demand. Some of you are too young to know this, but back in the 1960’s, if you needed to open the driver’s side window…
AUGUST 17, 2022
Dear Friends, This weekend, Jimmy and Loraine Mosby will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. They have known each other since they were in grade school, but didn’t start to date until the late 1960’s, when they were both enrolled at Arkansas Baptist College. They began their life together as husband and wife just weeks after Loraine graduated from Philander Smith College in the spring of 1972. Looking back on their five decades of marriage, Loraine says “any couple who has a healthy marriage and…
AUGUST 10, 2022
Dear Friends, Obedience brings blessing. Is that true? In your life? Or to put it another way, have you ever found that sometimes, obedience can lead to adversity? Think for a minute when God called Abram to leave his home, his family and all he knew, and to go to an unknown place. A land, God told him, “that I will show you.” Abram responded with faith. He obeyed God. When God called Abram out of Haran, he packed up his wife and his…
August 2, 2022
Dear Friends, You know you’re an apostle, right? I didn’t say Apostle. I said apostle. The punctuation matters here. As I read the New Testament, I see Jesus regularly sending out those who follow him. He sends them into cities and villages to share the good news of the Kingdom. And of course, the last thing he tells us is that we are to “go.” Go and make disciples. The word apostle means “sent one.” All who follow Jesus are sent. So using my old high…
July 27, 2022
Dear Friends, There is an interesting story in Luke’s gospel that sounds like it could have happened two days ago somewhere in the US. In the account in Luke 9, we read that Jesus had “set his face to go to Jerusalem.” This is the point in the gospel account where everything begins to point to the cross. Jesus is on mission and will not be deterred. Luke says Jesus sent an advance team of disciples ahead of him into a Samaritan village…
JULY 13,2022
Dear Friends, You’ve seen the pictures, right? I mean, wow. The gallery of images we’re getting from the Webb telescope is breathtaking. We’ve seen similar images created by Hollywood special effects artists, but this is something completely different. And along with the pictures are the numbers. Astrophysicist Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley says that the images we’re seeing tell us that “there are between a hundred billion and a trillion galaxies in the observable part of our universe.” Let that sink…
July 6, 2022
Dear Friends, It should not have taken anyone by surprise when almost two weeks ago, the US Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the Dodds v. Jackson Women’s Health case. Court watchers paid careful attention last fall when the Justices heard the oral arguments in the case, noting then that the questions asked by the Justices foreshadowed either the end of the Roe v. Wade precedent altogether, or at the very least, new allowances for states to regulate abortion. Then…
JUNE 29, 2022
Dear Friends, When I was seven years old, the President of the United States was assassinated. I remember the Friday it happened. We had come back to our second grade classroom right after lunch and recess and our teacher, Miss Clark, told us that she had to go to the Principal’s office for a few minutes. She told us to stay in the classroom and that she would know if any of us left while she was gone. I sat wondering…
JUNE 22, 2022
Dear Friends, First things first. Go Omahogs! Looks like they really want it this year. Game time is 3 PM on Thursday. Now, onto weightier matters. As providence would have it, after three months of reciting the Lord’s Prayer in our Sunday morning worship services, and after looking at the Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11, along with the parable that follows it, this was on my Twitter feed on Monday morning this week. Author and speaker Blair Linne posted it, along with the…
JUNE 15, 2022
Dear Friends, I know who you are. Assuming you are in Christ, you are a saint. According to James Montgomery Boice, Dr. Harry Ironside, who was pastor at Moody church in the 1920’s, used to travel many miles by train. On one of these trips, a four-day ride from the West Coast to his home in Chicago, Ironside found himself in the company of a party of nuns. They saw him reading his Bible and began to have conversations with him, learning that…
JUNE 8, 2022
Dear Friends, I want you to think for a minute about how you view the Bible. In our culture, there is an erosion of confidence in the Bible. People outside the church typically see it as a book of inspired wisdom, with some flaws that they can easily recognize and reject. In the church, there is also an erosion of confidence in the Bible. Holding to the idea that the scriptures are the infallible, inerrant, authoritative word of the Living God is increasingly…
June 1, 2022
Dear Friends, No one can get more from a verse of scripture than Charles Spurgeon could. Reflecting on Psalm 126:3, which says “The LORD has done great things for us; we are glad” Spurgeon observed “Some Christians are sadly prone to look on the dark side of everything, and to dwell more upon what they have gone through than upon what God has done for them. Ask for their impression of the Christian life, and they will describe their continual conflicts,…
MAY 25, 2022
Dear Friends, When I heard the news almost two weeks ago now that an 18 year old had walked into a grocery store in Buffalo, New York and senselessly murdered 10 people, I closed my eyes and shook my head. “O Lord…” I thought. “How long…” Then the news came of the even more horrific shooting this week in Uvalde, Texas. Again, a troubled young man walked into an elementary school and ended the lives of 18 children and two adults. When…
MAY 18, 2022
Dear Friends, When I was growing up, I remember seeing a two book set sitting next to my dad’s chair in the living room. They were actually the first two volumes in a 12 volume set. The author of these books, Arnold Toynbee, was a British historian and author. He was the research professor of international history at the London School of Economics. In these books, Toynbee suggested that as we review the rise and fall of great human civilizations throughout history,…
May 11, 2022
Dear Friends, Is it possible to have fellowship with God and live a sinful life? When the Apostle John wrote his first letter, he found himself addressing this issue head on. Some in the church had found themselves confused by false teachers who had told them that they needed to worry about keeping their spirits pure, but that whatever they did with their bodies didn’t really count, since our bodies are material and matter is inherently evil. That’s the heresy John was…
May 4, 2022
Dear Friends, Get ready. For the next eight weeks, you can expect the public square to be loud. And maybe violent. The words have already started flying. So have rocks, aimed at police. For almost half a century, there has been passion debate about abortion in our country. Every year, tens of thousands of people have traveled to Washington DC for the annual March for Life. When President Trump was elected, there were, in cities across our country, a number of Women’s March…