Hebrews is a tough book for many reasons — its imagery and themes are difficult. It is a sermon once delivered to a first-century church suffering persecution. Their lives were getting harder under the formalized, institutional persecution of Rome under…
For the last year in my ministry, I have been focused more directly on serving families. I have spent a lot of time working with and talking to families, and I have noticed a few things. For one, families are…
In my previous writing on this theme, I drew our attention to Jesus’ words about the source of evil in the world. “For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting,…
This series of lessons has orbited the theme of the lordship of Jesus, and now we are due for a summary of the concept. What do Christians mean when they say “Jesus is Lord”? First, I’ve claimed that a lord…
What do Christians mean by hope? I suspect the cynics among us confuse hope with naivete. They see it as a mere point of view about reality – a glass half full instead of half empty. The hopeful few seem…
What do Christians mean by faith? In the simplest sense, faith is trust or allegiance to a person. That definition is too flat for my taste, so I think it is better to explore the concept with a more specific…
What do Christians mean by grace? The doctrine of grace results from the doctrine of lordship, whether referring to the God of Israel in the Old Testament or to Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament. In the Old Testament,…
What do Christians mean by the word gospel? I’d like to let the Gospel of Mark answer this question, but to make sense of what he has to say, I need to offer a couple of preliminary tangents. First, a…
What do Christians mean when we say Jesus is Lord? The idea of a “lord” is foreign to the modern American. The closest we get to the concept is by watching Downton Abbey or other British period shows. An ancient…
