I don’t find preaching to be an onerous or nerve-wracking task. In high school, I quickly got involved in drama and music, and found even there God preparing me for a life in front of crowds. And while I take the prophetic role of the preacher seriously, I’ve seldom truly been afraid of it. Early […]
Following God is serious business. Today we read about ultimate consequences for those who lead others away from God. Death comes to those who worship other gods, and to those who lead others to join them. Following God is literally a matter of life and death in this passage. We hear all the time from […]
What does God want from us? People have been asking that forever. People have tried to work to answer this with their lives throughout time. They worship harder and they serve more and we get bigger and bigger churches and we follow more and more rules. And all the time we have this nagging sense […]
“One bad apple spoils the bunch.” We used to have a game we’d play in youth group to illustrate one of the first main points of today’s reading. We’d have one of the youth, usually the strongest, stand on top of a chair. His job was to pull everyone else up on the chair with […]
Just like yesterday, we find Mark using the wonderful literary technique called “the sandwich”. He puts a story in the middle of another story, splitting it in half, because the middle story helps us interpret the outer one. We see this again and again in both Mark and Luke, and today’s reading is no different. […]