Vacation

This week Shelley, Mae, and I are going to Colorado to hang out with her family.  That should be fun.  I might even get to do some fishing.   Tomorrow my friend Josh Knaub and Growing Young are going to be here.   I haven’t seen Josh in awhile so I’m looking forward to that.   
Sunday School went well [...]

Shelley and Myspace

For the longest time, my wife and I used to make fun of everyone and their myspace page.  But Shelley finally decided to start a myspace page.  Oh dear, what’s the world coming to! 

Isaiah 7

My friend Luke is taking an independent studies class on the book of Isaiah.  Last night we talked about the identity of Immanuel in 7:14.   The book of Immanuel (Isaiah 7-12) focuses on the Syro-Ephraimite crisis during the reign of King Ahaz.  Here’s a chart on the passage with a lot of helpful historical information. 
I [...]

A Better Righteousness

In the previous section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told his disciples that they were to fulfill Israel’s vocation of being “salt and light” to the world.  What’s more is that kingdom people ae expected to do a better job of that than the Pharisees and the teachers of the law did with that.   [...]

Youth Ministry and Education

Should a youth pastor pursue a Ph. D.?  Would that be a helpful degree for youth ministry?  Check out this post on Scot McKnight’s blog. 

Alvin Plantinga on naturalism

Alvin Plantinga is a Christian philosopher at the university of Notre Dame.  He’s best known for his Reformed Epistemology and his explanation of the problem of evil.  Here’s a lecture by him.
 In his book Warrented Christian Belief, Plantinga argues that if naturalism and evolution are true, then there is no reason to be sure that our [...]

The rest of the story

Imagine if you only knew about the first two books in The Lord of the Rings trilogy–The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers.   The story would be pretty incomplete, right?  There would be no ending, no climax to the story.  You wouldn’t know if Frodo destroyed the ring or if Aragon became king.  The Return of [...]

Prayer for Young People

God our Father, you see your children growing up in an unsteady and confusing world: Show them that your ways give more life than the ways of this world, and that following you is better than chasing after selfish goals.  Help them to take failure, not as a measure of their worth, but as a [...]

Grace Needed

Notice what NT Wright says about Jerry Falwell,
“Within the strange, large economy of God’s grace, which filters the truth of scripture through all of us imperfect interpreters, it may be that I make just as many mistakes as I think he did, but we are each called to be true to what we find in [...]

Beatitudes

The Beatitudes flip the world upside down (or right side up, depending on your perspective).  The Beatitudes announce that God is giving out blessings to the most unlikely sort of people.  The world thinks that the most happy folks on earth are the strong, the rich, the famous, and the attractive.   But it doesn’t take very [...]