“I love everyone, but I don’t have to like them,” I overheard these words of a fellow member of a church I belonged to a few years ago. I was shocked! How can we love someone without liking them? We use the word love so much, and liking, too, that I think we skip over […]

Have you been tracking the pictures of magnolias in my neighborhood that I’ve been posting the last eight weeks alongside the blog posts on the Beatitudes?  The flowers have gone from a tight bud through various stages of opening to a full flower, suggesting that the Beatitudes are a flowering of human potential in God. […]

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”  If Jesus is known as the Prince of Peace [foretold in Isaiah 9:6], then to follow Him means we are at peace with all that He was and taught, that we are at peace with ourselves and with everyone else. There are […]

  “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” Purity is holiness, untainted by any human impulse, unblemished by sin.  Jesus is talking about the releasing of all that stands between us and God in this Beatitude. And when we have released all that separates us from God, we will see God.[1] […]

[based on Romans 12:2] To live in the world and not be of the world is not something we can claim because we believe in Jesus Christ. It is a step-by-step dismantling of the world’s influence in our lives. It is taking the bias of the world out of our own thinking. It is giving […]

“So God created mankind in his own image…male and female he created them.“ [Genesis 1:27] And by extension so are each of us created in His image. But what does that mean? I believe that it means that there is something in us that reflects God, but that it remains a potential quality within us, […]

So much of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount was about creating a whole community of God, the kingdom of God. In The Beatitudes, Jesus blesses the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek(or unimportant), those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the peacemakers and even those who are persecuted.[Matthew 5:3-10] He goes […]

Willingness To give your life over to God to be born again To follow wherever He leads To lift up to Him whatever sin He highlights in us To worship Him always Faith is more than just a belief in Jesus Christ and God. Belief is a good starting point, but it won’t take you […]

My purpose in life came to me in two dreams. In the first I am talking to a favorite pastor and saying that his job is to inspire the congregation, mine is to connect the dots. As I pondered this dream over a few weeks, I saw that I am to connect 21st century life […]

How easy it is to see the sin in another’s life! How easy it is to judge another for what we do, but don’t acknowledge! How easy it is to condemn someone else for what we fail to see in ourselves. All this happens because our denials about our own shortcomings cause us to project […]