Two snakes: one in Genesis 3 and one in Numbers 21. Since I’ve spent the last few years knee-deep in the Exodus story, I finally made the connection between these slithery creatures the other day. Aha! I thought, these two snakes are connected. The first snake, the one in Genesis, represents Satan or the Devil […]
By the time we are teenagers we have grown shells like turtles– a hard, outer shell which surrounds our truer selves, protecting what is true and real within us. The shell consists of our cultural conditioning and our own self-image as well as our ego and everything human about us. We may think that all […]
A big reason why we don’t follow Jesus, why we get stuck in beliefs without the real relationship with Christ, why we limit what the Gospel is telling us so it is palatable and pretty easy to follow, is this: we’re too focused on ourselves and not on God. We are pretty naturally self-involved […]
Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing about the distorted lenses through which we see ourselves and life and the Godhead and how these distortions are the things that stand between us and a deep and loving relationship with Christ. So here’s the first one… If you’re having trouble accepting that God loves you, […]
We are born into this world a pretty complete package of personality, soul and spirit. We are created uniquely, each with certain talents and gifts and challenges, with an agenda, a potential, for our lives which is the province of the soul and the Indwelling Spirit to realize. And we are born into a human […]
Today I want to focus on two passages in Isaiah which to my mind communicate the whole of the Spiritual life. First, there is God who in Isaiah 43:1 tells the Israelites: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; and you are mine.” God goes on to tell […]
On a recent August morning I was reading the Bible Workbench lesson on Jacob wrestling with a man(or angel as some translations say) in preparation for the meeting at my church that day; tears are flowing from my eyes. As I ponder my reaction, I realize that my life[all our lives] has been consumed with […]
I belong to the whole church of Jesus Christ, the body of Christ, as Paul put it, in which every part of the body, every organ, vessel and nerve is an essential part of the whole. In fact the whole church of Jesus Christ cannot function if each part is not cooperating with every other […]
When God created us male and female in his image he declared his creation good, [Genesis 1:27-31] even though he gave us free will. Regardless of the state of the world which seems to be increasingly volatile, which we, all of mankind, have created, we have to entertain the possibility that God who knows […]
Each person has an inner lens through which s/he views the world. The lens can be clouded with prejudices, assumptions, preferences, self-serving attitudes or it can be clearer, able to see reality more truthfully. The source of these things that can cloud our vision of reality can be our religion, our culture and even the […]