Church Blog (Page 3)
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…
April 27, 2022
Dear Friends, I’ve been thinking about our kids a lot this week. I mean “our kids.” As in the kids who are part of Redeemer. Technically they are your kids. But I think about them as ours. Our kids have been busy recently. They also showed up big for our Resurrection Rally the day before Easter and learned about the events that led up to Jesus’ crucifixion and His resurrection. And throughout April, the elementary kids have been getting together on Thursday nights to…
APRIL 20, 2022
Dear Friends, It’s interesting to me that in a cancel culture world, the very biblical idea of calling out false teachers is either being recklessly applied or being ignored altogether. On one end of the spectrum, we have pastors who want to keep their ministry and preaching positive and encouraging. They want to inspire and uplift people. They don’t want to unnecessarily offend anyone. They want their language and demeanor to be charitable and kind. I would agree with the values those pastors…
APRIL 13, 2022
Dear Friends, The Bible tells us in Colossians 3 that we are “set our minds” on eternal things. On heavenly things. Setting your mind is like setting the oven. If you let your mind set itself, it will wander in all kinds of directions. So we set it. And re-set it. Over and over again. This week in particular, we should be setting our minds on the road that led Jesus to Golgotha. It is good for us to remember, reflect and…
APRIL 6, 2022
Dear Friends, Someone several years ago was putting together a profile page about me and they asked me if I had a favorite quote I could share. I hate questions like that. I mean, really. How can anyone be expected to review all the various quotes they’ve heard or repeated over the years (making sure they don’t miss any) and then somehow, on the fly, priority rank them until they have settled on their number one all-time favorite quote? In the end, I gave…
MARCH 30, 2022
Dear Friends, Imagine for a minute you’re in a movie theater (remember those?) watching a new romantic comedy. You’ve spent the last 95 minutes watching a couple meet in some awkward way that gets them off to a rocky start. You’ve watched as they’ve begun to open up to one another and to develop a fondness in the process. Of course, you’ve seen the big misunderstanding that has threatened to derail everything. Now you’ve arrived at the moment where the male…
MARCH 23, 2022
Dear Friends, In May of 1945, CS Lewis took on a topic that has puzzled people for centuries in an essay titled “Why Pray?” “The case against prayer… is this. The thing you ask for is either good — for you and for the world in general — or else it is not. If it is, then a good and wise God will do it anyway. If it is not, then He won’t. In neither case can your prayer make any…
MARCH 16, 2022
Dear Friends, When it comes to living out your faith, given the option of being too liberal or too legalistic, which would you choose? The question came up this week as I was reading a post from Trevin Wax. Trevin writes regularly for the Gospel Coalition and he’s one of the guys I read pretty regularly. As he addressed the very real concerns we should have about doctrinal drift in our churches, he made the point that “slippery slopes go more than one…