Thinking Out Loud

Image by  Naji Habib  from  Pixabay When the pandemic first began to change our way of life, I wrote that crisis would reveal things to us about ourselves, things we might not want to know. I’m not happy about how right I was. What we have learned in those darks times about the Christian witness in the marketplace of ideas is discouraging, if not disturbing. If our social media posts are any indication, •          we Christians are more anxious than we ought to be •          we are easily duped •          we are angry and irritable •          and we aren’t paying much attention to God’s Word Why are these things so? Why are so many people who have been bought by the blood of Christ thinking and speaking and acting so much like people who don’t know him? There are probably many answers to that question...

Photo by  Erik Mclean  on  Unsplash I was cleaning up some spilled oatmeal in the microwave oven the other day, and I had an epiphany. I know, not exactly a burning bush locale, but that’s where it happened. As I was cleaning up the oatmeal that spilled over when I made my breakfast, I decided just to go all out and clean the entire inside of the oven. It was a small task, but I knew that it would encourage my wife. I’m a natural-born people-pleaser, so my motives were mixed. As I wiped down the inside of the oven, I knew that my wife would probably notice that the microwave was clean and that she would probably thank me for that small gesture, amd I would like it that she said thanks. Win-win. It made me think about how, in a chicken-and-egg sort of way, this is the way a lot of thriving human relationships work. The giving and receiving of kind words and deeds creates a sort of healthy momentum: the kind word responds to the kind deed, which prompts the next k...

I grew up despising the Pharisees. After all, in every episode of the gospels where they appear, they wae Jesus’s implacable opponents. And Jesus himself denounces them as hypocrites ( Matthew 23 ). In Jesus’s day, the Pharisees were widely admired for the strict adherence to the Law, but thanks to their portrayal in the Gospels, the word “pharisaical” now carries only negative connotations of pious self-righteousness and judgmental hypocrisy. Then one day it struck me: I am more like the Pharisees than I realized, certainly more than I want to admit. •          They were men of the Word. •          Their blind spots were cavernous. •          They had turned spirituality into performance art. •          And their hearts were stony. In other words, they were far too much like me. I was reminded of that unpleasant epiphany this w...

Rijksmuseum,  creator unknown, Apostle Paul. Southern Netherlands. Date: 1600 – 1699. Finding our identity in our behavior is a lose-lose proposition . When we fail, we are tempted to despair. We find ourselves agreeing with the Accuser, and we even might be tempted to wonder if we really do belong to Jesus. But when we “succeed,” we are inclined to bask in self-congratulation that gives us the glory that belongs to God alone. The two seemingly opposite temptations have their roots in the same self-absorption and preoccupation with our works. In another post (“ A Study in Security and Identity, Part I: The Restoration of Peter ”) we explored how finding our security and identity in Christ steadies us spiritually when we rebel against God and find ourselves in despair. We showed how Peter went from monumental collapse in his three-fold denial of Christ to, a few weeks leader, the kind of holy boldness th...

Image by senivpetro on Freepik When you hear a pastor mention “stewardship,” it usually means he’s going to talk about money. So the whole topic of stewardship often ranges somewhere between tedious and awkward. Stewardship does have to do with money, of course, but the biblical understanding of stewardship is far richer and deeper than mere money management. Many Christians have a one-dimensional view of stewardship. Their approach to stewardship runs something along these lines: “carefully managing my money so that I can give God His 10% share so that I still have enough to meet all my present and future wants and needs.” That understanding of stewardship is faulty on several counts. The most obvious is that a steward is not an owner, but the popular understanding of stewardship focuses almost all its attention on the self (go back and notice the four first-person singular pronouns in that definition). But there’s a deeper problem that me-centered way of thinking about steward...