“Stuffed!” “Full!” “I’m done!” Thanksgiving dinners have a tendency to do that. Gone are the cravings for mashed potatoes and the longings for cranberries and turkey. Gone is the anticipation for the great feast. You’ve eaten. You’re full. The hunger is forgotten. It is time for a nap! We experience being full in different ways. From your stomach to your gas tank; from your piggy bank to your house—when life is full, it’s easy to forget what it was like to be empty.
Read MoreDuring the time of the Reformation, justification was heralded as the central article of the Christian faith. Namely, as Scripture says, “ all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:23-24). All humankind is guilty of offending God by their sin, deserving only death and damnation, but on account of Christ, they are declared innocent and made righteous through faith in His death and resurrection.
Read MoreOne would be hard pressed to find anyone, regardless of political persuasion, who wouldn’t acknowledge that our state and nation have been, and remain, in a state of turmoil. From the COVID crisis … to the climate crisis … to the transgender crisis … to the education crisis … to the crisis of loneliness … and on and on. No sooner has one issue grabbed our attention than an even more disturbing one is being forced onto the societal stage – it, too, demanding our immediate attention. The net effect is nothing less than an unrelenting state of social chaos, leaving an increasingly large number of people, especially young people, bewildered and, sometimes, despairing. Indeed, it’s been an unsettling phenomenon we’ve been experiencing for years now.
Read MoreWhat is it about a person that makes thousands of people drop everything to race after Him? Jesus was dealing with some bad news that was sad news. His cousin, John the Baptist, had been murdered by Herod and He needed some time to process it all. As was often His practice, He went away to rest and pray. But when He gets ashore, there is a massive crowd already waiting for Him.
Read MoreGeographically, we Minnesotans still occupy the same physical space - the same part of God’s good creation - we always have. Culturally and politically, however, one could make the case we no longer live in the same state, or even the same world, we did even a few years ago.
Read MoreGod declares each day of creation to be “good.” Yet, on day six, the day human beings are created, He intensifies that description: “God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good” (Gen. 1:31).
Good—pleasant, agreeable, excellent, superb. That’s how we think about God’s declaration, as an adjective that describinges His act of creation. But good is also a noun. Good—decent, blameless, upright, moral, righteous. So, which is it here? I’d argue for both. One that describes the beginning of all that there is, the other that describes the origins of all that there is.
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