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  9/8/2021 Romans 15:1,7 (NIV) "We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves… Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God." Paul is clever here. “We (I) who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak (you)… “ This passage in Paul’s letter to those who believe in Jesus Christ is directed to the problem of getting the Church to work with a collection of misfits who all have a selfish nature. It is written to the new believers in first century Rome but applies to believers in all cultures throughout the rest of time. Paul of course includes himself in the seventh chapter of this letter. Our selfish natures tend to interpret scriptures to suit ourselves. The Holy Spirit who inspired the letters of Paul will of course work with each believer to sort it all out, but we must face the fact that the ‘I’ becomes the ‘you’ in the verse above as others read it for themselves. (Yes, I am...

  9/4/2021 Genesis 3:22 [NIV] And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” We are infected with the knowledge of Good and Evil. To deny this is to condemn ourselves to destructive ignorance: we will never be able to discern between good and evil and our lives will be filled with the illusion we are good while we embrace death and destruction. It is the doorway we entered when we drew our first breath. The only way out is to go forward with that knowledge and to seek Good above all else, until we die. Death will be the revelation of who we truly are: one who loves Good above all else, or one who loves Self. Self is the will to be our own god; to love ourselves above all else and seek to do what is best for Me. All else serves My perceived best interests, whether it be philosophy, religion, or a false goodness that is in fact, Evil...

  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” [Jesus, on the cross] “I will never leave you or forsake you” [God, in us] No words were ever spoken in such absolute and total despair, as the cry of Jesus Christ on the cross. He began his journey to that moment the night before in the Garden of Gethsemane praying so intently that he sweat great drops of blood: “If it be possible, let this cup pass… Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done”. The weight of our sins brought him to that moment of despair, when the consequences of God the Son carrying our sins caused him to feel separated from God the Father. “He who knew no sin, became sin for us” and we cannot imagine the horror of that moment when the reality Christ felt was completely at odds with the love and truth of the Father whose plan redeemed for all time ‘whosoever will’. Jesus knew that moment was coming, yet yielded his will to the Father and in doing so, broke forever the chains of our sins that keep us separated from Go...

  June 10, 2021 - Habakkuk 1:3,4 [NIV} "Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds. Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted." We are moving away from an area that has been devastated by a paralyzing inability to confront sheer madness. Most of the businesses downtown are boarded up after being systematically robbed and damaged by looters and rioters who knew the law would do little or nothing to hold them accountable. Many people in the area feel helpless about changing anything. And now children will be taught in area schools that we are bad people who are responsible for all the wrong in our society for no other reason than the color of our skin. Good and evil are very real. The prophet Habakkuk described the rising insanity in the kingdom of Judah. Judgment was coming in the form of ...

  May 28, 2021 “Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” John 4:23-24 [NIV] I think that if Jesus were to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan to today’s Believers, it would be ‘The Good Gay’. While it is not true for all, the aversion Jews and Samaritans felt towards each other was similar to today’s divide between Gays and Christians in general. Jesus set aside several taboos in striking up a conversation with the Woman at the Well, including the one that struck at the heart of their divide: who were the true worshipers of God. The woman tried to get a rise out of Jesus by bringing up the issue of the true place of worship—Mt Gerizim in Samaria where the Children of God first worshiped him in the Promised Land, or the place of Solomon’s original temple in Jerusalem. Jesus...

  Love God. Fear God. Of all the contradictions in the Bible, these two have given me the most trouble. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God” and “Be not afraid”, and “God is a terrible God” has given me pause to think about my relationship with God. Any person who treats another like this is controlling and abusive. I remember one time in my life where I spoke angrily to God and asked him how he could demand that I love Him. That crises came when I realized I could not doubt or deny his existence. And yet the Bible continues to pile on with “Fear not”, and “Nothing can separate us from God’s love”. I do not doubt that God is Love, despite what I read in the Old Testament, or that Hell is real because of what Jesus reveals about it in the New Testament. The key for me is understanding the relationship between love and fear. We are all afraid of something. Fear controls the world around us and gives rise to all the anger and wrath that separates us fro...

  Subject: BibleGateway.com Verse of the Day - May 18 2021     God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them . Hebrews 6:10 NIV   Dear Family and Friends,   It's my birthday today and I'm sitting here with mixed emotions.  BibleGateway.com puts a verse-of-the-day in my gmail every morning and I try to look at it first thing to get my mind around the presence of Christ and his place in my day.  So... as I opened the email I wondered, what will I see on my birthday?   This feels like a shameless promotion of my own goodness which would normally keep me quietly enjoying the message from God all to myself, but... I know myself, and I have thanked God many times for his goodness in my life.  I really do remember all the good things that you've done, and all the good things that you've helped me do...   This is really more than words to a song ...