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Romans 12:2, the tension between the world’s values and God’s values, this call to live sacrificially and to embrace God’s perspective is challenging, especially in a world that often encourages self-interest, but true transformation begins when you surrender your own agendas and allow God’s...

Titus 2:11-12, Paul explains exactly how grace works, for the grace of God has appeared, that offers salvation to all people, it teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright and Godly lives. Teaches, grace teaches, grace empowers, grace...

1 Peter 2:7, this rejection wasn’t accidental, it was deliberate, the religious leaders and many others dismiss Jesus, refusing to acknowledge his authority and divinity. Yet, their rejection did not diminish Jesus Christ’s role, instead, it fulfilled God’s plan, making him the very cornerstone...

The ideal of what Eden is, is a place where Heaven and Earth are the same place, where the human images rule and live and work and steward creation in harmony and oneness with the Divine will. The exile of Adam and Eve from Eden, down the mountain into the low lands becomes this image of the...

The roots of religion.

the Old Testament is Israel against the nations and God against the other gods, things became adversarial. The Israelites themselves, the people of Yahweh who were specially created after the disinheritance of the nations, God’s own people begin to gravitate toward the worship of these other...

Matthew chapter 6, the Lords pray, this is a unique part of the heritage of what Jesus gave to us in this prayer, is that the unique status that he believed he had as the chosen one, the son of the father is an identity into which he invites his followers, so that my father becomes our father...

Jesus shows, the way he talks and acts, expresses the mindset of somebody who believes their identity is the unique seed of the women, the chosen son of Abraham, the chosen one of David and the son of man, the son of humanity from Daniel chapter 7. The Hebrew Bible makes a claim, that this is a...

Formative, shaping experience of prayer is not in competition with other forms of prayer, it’s in addition, prayer is a many facet jewel in possession of the community of Jesus and it can do many things. Formative prayer that’s meant to shape us through repetition over a long period of time...

When Jesus teaches a prayer, it’s his own unique stamp, but also combining things that all of his neighbors were praying as he was growing up too. If our habits form us, then this is a tradition that has not forgotten that our physical body, movement, postures, rhythms, habits, shape our view of...

Romans 11:26, in God’s wisdom, the rejection of Jesus by much of Israel, led to the good news being preached to the Gentiles, but Paul says that God’s plan isn’t finished yet, he prophesies that a time will come, when Israel will turn back to God. Not every single person of Israel will...

Jesus himself is not innovating with the idea of introducing a new prayer, if you’re forming a crew of disciples and you want to teach them what you’ve learned about how to be faithful to the covenant and to love God and love neighbor, teaching memorable prayers that would be memorized and...

Prayer is something you do morning, middle, day and evening and you weave into the fabric of your life, reciting ancient prayers and making them your own. Jesus would have uttered this prayer hundreds of times throughout his life and his time with the disciples and that he would adapt the...

When Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, in Luke chapter 11, the disciples come up to him and ask him and he gives them a model prayer that’s similar to this one in Matthew, but also different, it seems for Jesus, this model prayer could actually take a few different verbal forms, but the core...

Liturgy and liturgies are practices, rituals, routines, they are something that you do, that do something to you. What makes liturgies religious, what makes rituals spiritual, is not that they just plant ideas in our heads, it’s that they are actually inscribing a desire in our heart for some...

The ancients appreciated that we are aesthetic beings, we are very much shaped by what we imagine and the imagination is a core faculty of the human person, but it also means we are embodied beings, we are material beings, our bodies are integral to our identity, which is why bodily rituals, to...

1 Peter 15-16, holiness, often misunderstood as perfectionism or unattainable purity is about being set apart for God, it means aligning every aspect of your lives with his will, becoming vessels for his glory. The weight and beauty of this call, holiness is not about earning God’s favor, but...

1 Peter 1:8, Peter calls believers to rejoice, though you have not seen Jesus Christ, you love him and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy. This joy is not rooted in circumstances, but in the relationship believers have...

Galatians 3:1, Paul doesn’t sugarcoat the situation, to Paul, this wasn’t just a disagreement about religious practices, it was a betrayal of the good news message itself. The heart of the crisis lay in a fundamental question, is salvation by grace alone or is it grace plus law, Paul’s answer is...

The New Covenant has begun and of course what happens at Pentecost is directly tied back to what Jesus did on the cross and his resurrection. In the Old Testament, prior to the New Covenant, the notion of being elect and being a believer in Yahweh, a follower of Yahweh are actually two separable...