In Matthew 22, Jesus was asked, “Which is the most important commandment?” and he answered, “Easy: First, love God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Second, love others as you love yourself—or like you would want to be loved.” And in those two commandments, he summed up all 613 of the Old Testament laws.
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First, by giving God their firstborn, they were saying that God got their first and their best. And because there’s no way to know what will come after the firstborn, they were also declaring that they trusted God to provide for their future.
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Larry Crabb has an old book called The Silence of Adam, in which he makes the case that original sin goes back, in part, to the silence of Adam and the failure of men to step up and lead, a dominant problem throughout human history. Genesis makes it clear that when God created Adam and Eve, he put Adam in a position of authority—not to lord over Eve, but to serve and ...
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Do you ever feel like your Christian life is mostly a matter of duty? You might be doing all of the right things—but it’s coming from a place of obligation. And obedience that flows from obligation gets stale very, very quickly. How can we transform our obedience from duty to delight? We get a clue in, arguably, the most important passage in the Old Testament—2 Samuel 7.
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One of my favorite movie scenes of all time is Liam Neeson’s portrayal of the forgiveness of Jean Valjean in the movie rendition of Les Mis. The scene goes like this. (Um, spoiler alert? The book is more than a century old. And the movie came out before most of the people in my church were born. So this isn’t exactly new. But hey, I’m generous, so … spoilers ahead.)
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Many of the blessings of God are released into our lives only through persistent, unrelenting prayer. God had promised to bless Jacob when he returned to his homeland, yet only after a full night of wrestling—and giving Jacob a permanent injury—did God let Jacob pin him and obtain the blessing.
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What do we mean when we say “gospel above all”? Is that another way of saying “just preach Jesus” and avoiding the messy and uncomfortable conversations about injustice? For sure, some generations of Christians have been guilty of that in the past—using the cloak of “just preach the gospel” to avoid the awkward and uncomfortable implications of the gospel for social dynamics. Is that what we mean?
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Picture this: I was preaching in this little church and a Pentecostal woman, sitting about halfway back, kept raising her hand. I found it strange but kept going. She was relentless, so I finally asked her, “Do you have a question?” She turned white as a sheet. Turns out, she didn’t have a question. That was just her way of saying “Amen” in response to what I was teaching. (Neither of us ...
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When God created the world, he used a wand. No, that’s not right. When God created the world, he concocted a potion. That’s not right either.
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The greatest temptation you’ll have this year is to pursue some good purpose—some good thing you believe God wants you to have (and you may be right)—in your own way. You might say, “I feel like God wants me to be prosperous and bless me with money, but it’s not happening fast enough, so I’ll just hedge a little bit here and there, or overwork myself to make it happen.” Or, “I ...
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