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There’s a story in the Bible about a garden, where God and humans live together and the biblical authors want us to see this garden as a type of temple. The top is the most sacred place, the Holy of Holies, where God’s presence is most intense and that’s where we find the tree of life. What’s...

In the Bible, we learn that every human is a image of God, a sacred being who represents the Creator and is worthy of respect. In this way of seeing the world, sin is a failure to love God and others by not treating them with the honor they deserve. We can see this idea in the famous code of...

Faith is both thinking and responding to good reason that something is changing, it’s actually living in light of that reality and as we do so, it puts us in touch with the substance or the reality of the thing that we’re hoping for. We experience this reality of that biblical faith, it begins...

Exodus 34:6, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, overflowing with loyal love and faithfulness, this last characteristic of God is the Hebrew word “emet” which can be translated as “faithfulness” or even “truth,” it’s related to another word “amen” which is an untranslated Hebrew...

Acts chapter 28:16-20, Paul is in the middle of his court trial, and it is not going well, out of this very dark situation, Paul appeals to Timothy, who is still on assignment in Ephesus, he asked Timothy to come be with him in prison so Paul can pass on to him the church planting mission he...

Philemon was a well-to-do Roman citizen from Colossae, who met Paul during his mission in Ephesus, and he became a follower of Jesus. Then later, when Paul’s co-worker Epaphras started a Jesus community in Colossae, Philemon became a leader of a church that met in his house. Now Philemon, like...

During one of Paul’s many imprisonments for announcing Jesus as the risen Lord, he wrote to a group of people that he had never met, who made up a church community that he did not start. The church in Colossae was started by a co-worker of Paul’s, named Epaphras, who was actually from that city...

Acts 16:12, Philippi was a Roman colony in ancient Macedonia, it was full of retired soldiers, and it was known for its patriotic nationalism. Paul faced resistance, when he was announcing Jesus as the true King of the world, and after Paul moved on from there, those who became followers of...

Ephesians 1:15-23, Paul prays that we would wake up to the fact, that we as God’s people, we are God’s own special treasured possession, God created a special people, who are unique and holy, who are distinct and different than the world around us, precisely to be the witnesses to his mercy and...

Paul paints the big picture in Ephesians to remind people, specifically the basic message is that through Jesus, everybody has been welcomed into the covenant family of God’s people. What Paul is really talking about, he’s focusing in on, how is it that we who are not Jewish people, but in the...

This remaking of our minds, we don’t do that in a day, we begin that journey of following Jesus with a moment of conviction, with a prayer, it is a very long process, but Paul saying, this is about a perpetual renewal of our mind, a new way of thinking, adopting this new identity. Letting our...

What is Paul up to in his letters? Paul’s core conviction is that fundamental change happens to us, when our very sense of who we are is completely revolutionized behavior, follows our sense of identity. Don’t live like the Gentiles, because we are something new, we are all new kinds of humans...

You are new kinds of humans. Holy, you are distinct and set apart now, from your previous identity. You are more loved than you can possibly imagine, beloved children. You are children of the light, you don’t have to live in the dark anymore. Parameters, these are indications of what living into...

You are new kinds of humans. Holy, you are distinct and set apart now, from your previous identity. You are more loved than you can possibly imagine, beloved children. You are children of the light, you don’t have to live in the dark anymore. Parameters, these are indications of what living into...

The story of how Paul came to the city of Ephesus. “Acts chapter 19” Ephesus was a huge city, it was the epicenter of worship for most of the Greek and Roman gods. For over two years, Paul had a really effective missionary presence there, lots of people became followers of Jesus, but years...

People think of the kingdom of God as a place, there is God’s space, where God is king, there’s a reality in which God reigns and where everything that is done, is God’s will. The story of the Bible as it goes on, the earth has become a place where God’s will is not done, because we assert our...

The author is saying that Jesus is superior to all of the previous ways that God has revealed himself to Israel, making this astounding claim that Jesus is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s nature, Jesus is what the rays of light are to the sun, Jesus is what the wax...

So Jesus didn’t come to abolish the laws, but Jesus saw them as within a storyline, that pointed forward to something greater than the law, he believed that he was the greater thing that was needed. Jesus was going to do something that solved the problem that Moses and the prophets identified...

Paul spent many years traveling about and starting new churches, he developed a large team of co-workers in this mission, Timothy was one of these. Paul was once in the city of Lystra, and he met Timothy’s faithful mother and grandmother, and he was impressed by Timothy’s passion and devotion to...

Titus was a Greek follower of Jesus, who was for years a trusted co-worker and traveling companion of Paul, helping Paul in a number of crisis situations in the past. Paul had assigned Titus the task of going to Crete, to restore order to a network of house churches. Cretan culture was notorious...