Earlier this week, I was wrestling with a bottom line for an upcoming sermon. The passage in question was tricky. The opportunity to go in multiple directions was both alluring and bewildering. The temptation to "borrow" the insights of another preacher was real. The...
A friend of mine recently told a group of us that he has a minor condition with his nervous system. ---------------------------------------------------- And I asked what I thought was the obvious question: "Why don't we have a calm system?" We have nerve...
Forty years ago yesterday, January 7, 1979, I became a Christian. I had been baptized as an infant in the Episcopal Church, but by the time I was four or five, my mom stopped going herself or taking her kids. So I never went to Sunday School, never attended VBS,...
Yesterday's message ... Started what might be our most timely series ever, Up In Arms; Presented Proverbs as one of the few places in the bible where context is something, not everything; Had a rare "two phased" bottom line. For most of the message it was People who...
Have you noticed? Have you noticed how so many people are so mad these days? Mad at each other. Mad at traffic. Mad at politicians. Mad at themselves. And … have you noticed that the same people keep getting mad at the same things? And maybe, just maybe, have you...
Each week, our staff receives Prayer Cards from our Children's Ministry. The Prayer Cards contain prayer requests from the youngest folks in our church. Here's the one I received last week: ------------------------------------- A first grader praying to have...
I love the last line of the Apostles’ Creed: [. . . I believe] in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Amen. While the Creed may not have the same level of authority as inspired Scripture, it nevertheless represents the best of the collective wisdom...
Julie and I took off on Christmas Day for several days away, and so Chris Thayer, our Zoar Campus Pastor, preached "live" at Moss and via hologram to Zoar. I gave Chris some unusually specific direction for this message -- he knew he was concluding the series Wait For...
Well, you could hardly have a Good Shepherd series called Wait For It and NOT title one of the Sundays "The Waiting Is The Hardest Part," could you? So this Sunday both the sermon series AND 2018 wind up with a message called exactly that. We have our NORMAL Sunday...
This Christmas made me think of the one when I was 16, in Dallas, and ALL I wanted was the cassette tape of Led Zeppelin's Houses Of The Holy album. That was IT. (Unfortunately, in a behavior pattern that continues in many respects to this very day, I didn't tell...