What are you going to do with the anger that comes when you face serious mistreatment, serious injustice? Modern readers expect the Psalms to give inspiration, so when they read the searing pain and anger in Psalm 137, they say, “What’s this doing in...
For physical health, we have trainers and doctors. Through nutrition and exercise, trainers help you get further than you were. And when you get sick or injured, doctors help get you back on track. It’s the same thing spiritually. There are spiritua...
Paul says you have to work the gift of salvation into every nook and cranny of your life, and that you do that through spiritual disciplines. That’s how you change. But the modern mind finds some of these disciplines more appetizing than others. The...
For the first time, in Mark 15, we have Jesus in front of the political establishment, the Roman state. So we have to ask the question, “What is the relationship of Jesus to politics, of Christianity to the government?” Pilate asks three questions....
The word “blessed” in Hebrew is much richer than it is English. It means total fulfillment and well-being. How do we get that? The answer in Psalm 1 is that blessedness comes to a person who has learned to meditate on the law of the Lord. That’s an e...
You can’t escape the city anymore. Technology means the kids in the farmlands of Iowa are getting immersed in the culture that’s formed in the cities. The problems of cities dominate the regions and societies in which those cities exist. But as we s...
The story of Noah and the flood is about the fact that God is committed to creation, and he’s ready to give new beginnings. He’s ready to give a second chance. In Genesis 9, God says to Noah and his family the same thing he said to Adam and Eve. In...
Some of you are thinking, “The idea of divine judgment is upsetting, outdated, and irrelevant.” My goal is to respectfully show you that you’re absolutely wrong on all three counts. The story of Noah and the flood is about divine judgment. And if we...
It’s fratricide, it’s brother killing brother, it’s a sensational story—the story of Cain and Abel. People call this the first case study of murder, but I think that’s missing the point. It’s actually the first case study of life east of Eden. In Ge...
The Western romantic idea of human nature was that we’re inherently good. But the problem is over the last century, we’ve discovered that oppression and evil have not gone away but rather have erupted with ferocity over and over again regardless of s...
Earlier in the twentieth century, the intellectuals of the Western world said it was our society and our institutions that were making us bad. If we changed them, then we’d get rid of atrocities, evil, war, racism, and poverty. But it hasn’t worked....
At street level there’s still this saccharine view that human beings are basically good and our problems come from our environment. But the Western intellectual world is beginning to see evidence that there’s something inherently evil and violent in...
We are created for relationship. One of the key differences I hope to show you between the biblical idea of God and other alternative views of God is in this whole idea of relationship. Genesis 1 shows us three things: 1) why we need relationships, 2...
The book of Acts is all about the earliest Christianity. It shows us something about the character of the earliest Christianity, especially about where the church got its power. The book of Acts, but also the Bible in general, is bound to surprise yo...
Something is going on with work in our culture. We’ve lost our rhythms of work and rest. And work is becoming a crisis issue. In Genesis 1 and 2, work and rest come up in the very beginning of creation. This tells us that understanding work and rest...
