Weekly Updates (Page 4)
Each week, our teaching pastor Bob Lepine offers his thoughts and perspective on how we live for Jesus in our world. In addition, the blog has updates on upcoming activities at Redeemer. You can receive the weekly blog as an email. Send us your email address to subscribe.
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…
March 9, 2022
Dear Friends, Okay, first things first. They’re about to mess with our clocks and our circadian rhythms again! This weekend. Don’t forget. Time to spring forward. With that said, I want you to think for a minute about an expression used in scripture that I think perfectly captures the way we feel at times. In fact, it’s the way a lot of us have felt pretty often during the past couple of years. The phrase is found in Isaiah 61, where the…
March 2, 2022
Dear Friends, On Sunday, as we took time to pray for the people of Ukraine, I introduced you to Pastor Alex Tarasov and his family; his wife Anna, their son Sviatoslav (16 yrs) and Maria (14 yrs). Alex is the Pastor of Vertical Bible Church in Kyiv. The church is part of the Great Commission Collective of churches that we are part of as well. I wanted to pass along to you this week the update from Alex so you can continue to pray specifically for…
FEBRUARY 23, 2022
Dear Friends, Do you want to live a life that is pleasing to God? Do you hope to one day hear Jesus say to you “well done, good and faithful servant?” I presume the answer is yes. Let me tell you where to start. You start with faith. Specifically, you start by believing that God exists. That He is. That He created the universe and everything in it and that He sustains it by His mighty power and in wisdom. It has to…
FEBRUARY 16, 2022
Dear Friends, If you ever find yourself in Nashville on a Monday night, you owe it to yourself to see if the Time Jumpers happen to be playing at Third and Lindsley. Most Monday nights, they’re there, putting on a wonderful two hour show of the best in Western Swing music. The Time Jumpers are the best of the best – legendary studio session players who have backed up just about everyone who has ever recorded a country album in Nashville. …
FEBRUARY 9, 2022
Dear Friends, Christianity is a revealed religion. As Christians, what we know and believe about God and life and eternity is not something that people dreamed up a long time ago. It’s something God has revealed to us. Singer songwriter Rich Mullins said about our faith “It is the very truth of God and not the invention of any man… I did not make it. No it is making me.” The writer of Hebrews echoes that proposition in his epistle. He…