Savoring the Savior

Anytime someone asks me how God speaks to us today, my first response is through the Bible. God's primary means of communicating to us about who he is and who we are is found in his own revelation to us in Scripture. In the Old Testament, he speaks to us throughout history, through poetry, through his law, and by the mouths of his prophets. In the New Testament, he speaks through his Son - Jesus, as we read the eye-witness accounts of the gospels, see the creation and confession of the early church, and are encouraged by the writings of the apostles. God primarily  speaks through his word... but he can also speak through our circumstances, through situations and other people. This morning, I was reminded of the latter. In our Sunday School class, we have decided to devote one Sunday each month to focus on prayer. Rather than have prayer be the two shorter bookends to a longer lesson or lengthy discussion, one Sunday each month we have decided to invert our "order of se...

I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary...  Since the era of the Enlightenment, there have been objections to the authenticity of Jesus' birth found in the gospel narratives of Matthew and Luke. Some scholars have suggested that early Christians borrowed mythical elements from ancient literature in an attempt to adapt the gospel to a Hellenistic (Greek) culture (1), while others have suggested that there has been an error in translating the word almah, leading to a conclusion that the original authors did not explicitly express. Many versions of the Bible render this word as virgin while critics argue that it should be translated young woman or maiden. William Beck, who has done extensive research of the word comments,   I have searched exhaustively for instances in which almah might mean a non-virgin or a married woman. Ther...

“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. “Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you. Matthew 7:1-6 (ESV)  "Judge not" has become the mantra of our culture as it increasingly seeks to equate tolerance  with acceptance . Many people attempt to use Jesus's words here as a means to prohibit someone from evaluating the choices of another. The irony is, these same people are guilty of the very thing Jesus is warning us about. It is obvious ...