Being Christian Without Losing Your Mind
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“How terrible it will be for you legal experts and Pharisees! Hypocrites! You give to God a tenth of mint, dill, and cumin, but you forget about the more important matters of the Law: justice, peace, and faith. You ought to give a tenth but without forgetting about those more important matters.” — Matthew 23:23 …
Every day, they met together in the temple and ate in their homes. They shared food with gladness and simplicity. They praised God and demonstrated God’s goodness to everyone. The Lord added daily to the community those who were being saved. — Acts 2:46-47 Usually, two occasions cause me to cry. The first is when I …
“You ignore God’s commandment while holding on to rules created by humans and handed down to you.” Jesus continued, “Clearly, you are experts at rejecting God’s commandment in order to establish these rules.” — Mark 7:8-9 The Achille’s heal of religious people is following unquestioned rules because it makes them look and feel good. “The Bible says so…” …
There’s a season for everything and a time for every matter under the heavens: a time for giving birth and a time for dying. — Ecclesiastes 3:1-2a It seems to me that there’s a certain rhythm to life, or “seasons” as the writer of Ecclesiastes described it. 1st stage: Accept and Anticipate As children, we receive …
Let all of these praise the Lord’s name because only God’s name is high over all. Only God’s majesty is over earth and heaven. — Psalm 148:13 I look forward to those seasons when cicadas make their mysterious presence known. For 13 to 17 years, they live underground. The larvae look like white, ghostly caterpillars, feeding …
Just as through one human being sin came into the world, and death came through sin, so death has come to everyone, since everyone has sinned. — Romans 5:12 The old concept of original sin, formulated by Augustine, was that the consequences of the first disobedience in the Garden of Eden was passed on to …
There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. — Galatians 3:28 Father Richard Rohr, in one of his daily devotions, made an interesting point about the historic tension between conservatives and liberals. He noted that in the Bible, one of the characteristics of being Jewish was to …
Imagine that someone who’d never read the Bible opened it up to Deuteronomy 21-22. They would read instructions such as: “Stone until [dead]” a rebellious child…an adulterous couple…a woman who had sex before marriage. And if a man mistreats his wife, he’s forbidden to divorce her, a rule that ensures a lifetime of misery for …
Even the hairs of your head are all counted. — Matthew 10:30 I often begin my daily devotions by recalling/celebrating what I consider calling cards from God: those times when the Spirit interrupts things with the wonderfully mysterious. They are wide-ranging and include weird happenings that sound either sublime or ridiculous, according to your perspective. Nonetheless, I …
Our Father who is in heaven, uphold the holiness of your name. — Matthew 6:9 When I used to travel west and ski (before kids, in other words), the top of the mountain was a holy place. I simply seemed closer to God. Looking up, the sky was bluer and the clouds, whiter. Though I …