This blog is Pastor Jay's weekly musings about God's Word, God's world, and God's call to our culture. We hope they encourage, challenge, and inform you. Sign up to recieve them in your email.
Every single person exists in circles of relationships. Maybe we could call them spheres of influence. There is the work sphere, the church sphere, the neighborhood sphere, the school sphere and more. In that circle are certain people that you basically only interact with in that sphere. There might be some overlap in those spheres, but usually the larger part of those p...
Keep ReadingIn the last blog post I laid the foundation for biblical love and the impossibly to do it as an unregenerate person. The first and second great commandments are the heart of the issue and I worked off of those to put together a definition of love. That definition was as follows: Love is the worship and obedience to God that overflows in joyfully and sacrificially doing ...
Keep ReadingDespite all the love songs and love stories and love poems that have filled our culture, the culture is still no closer to knowing what love actually is. You can't change blindness by talking about seeing. The aforementioned songs, stories, and poems have only hardened people into a kind of love that is not actually true and glorious love. Self-seeking human nature stays...
Keep ReadingWhen it comes to truth, everybody talks a good game. People will tell you they are "truth-seekers," that they will follow wherever the evidence leads, that they only wants the facts, that they can create a no-spin zone. On and on it goes. But truth is a big deal. It doesn't only encompass the mundane relational, societal, and political matters of life, but more important...
Keep ReadingI have been preparing for my India trip where I will be teaching pastors and church leaders how to faithfully handle the Psalms and other poetry scripture. In that preparation, I will have to deal with an issue many Christians would rather ignore: imprecatory psalms. The imprecatory psalms are those in which the biblical writer, usually David, is calling down destruction...
Keep ReadingSome books seem to come a couple of decades too late. This is one of those book for me. What a help this would have been to me when I was a teenager. And I wasn't even a particularly rebellious teen. Yet, the areas and issues that this book covers are so common for every teen, there will be loads of help for all. But to be honest, anger is not just a teen problem. It is ...
Keep ReadingI was encouraged to listen to a podcast the other day. The title of the episode was You Need More Than God. Provocative, to say the least. What made this challenging was that these speakers were making a biblical case for this argument. The argument was thought-provoking and caused me to wrestle with the premise for weeks. Let me frame up the case they were making. The ...
Keep ReadingHebrews chapter 11 is one of the most famous and treasured portions of Scripture. While there is so much that can be mined from this chapter, I want to give you a few of the major features that will get you well-situated for diving into it yourself. First, chapter eleven is not about faithin general. It is about a certain feature of faith. Chapter eleven is about the fa...
Keep ReadingSometimes when we are really feeling righteous, there are certain statements that roll off our tongue and smash down on those whom we are confronting about sin. One of those statements is that God is more interested in our holiness than our happiness. We poke them in the eye with this statement, hoping to make them see that if they are going to know and follow God, then ...
Keep ReadingThere is a special literary device in Hebrew scripture that you find occasionally, especially in the poetry passages. This device is called a Chiasm. Since the writers didn't have a way to put things in bold or italics, this was a devise to highlight and emphasize. To understand how this devise works, think of it as a literary pyramid. You have several statements or word...
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