Generosity Beyond Our Wildest Imagination

Reflections from a young man listening to the Sermon on the Mount

. . . I am a shepherd. It had been a hard week. I had been out on the hills with the sheep. Our best ewe had fallen in a crevice and died in the storm. I had just come into town last night. I had run out of food and was so hungry.

Birth . . .

Where and how do we start telling the story of Christ? Matthew starts his narrative with a genealogy, Mark kicks off with a prophecy from Isaiah, Luke takes an historical approach, and John pushes back to a time before time saying, “In the beginning was the one who is called the Word . . .” (v 1).

Stuff that Grosses Out God

It is not every day that we stop and wonder just what grosses God out. The writer of Proverbs spells it out very clearly in these verses.

While the writer gives to us a whole list of seven things to consider, I was challenged by the first thing God hates—“haughty eyes”.

An Eternal Love Story

Psalm 45 overflows with love language. Perhaps it was written for Solomon, or perhaps it was intended to be used for any of Israel’s kings. But the quotation from this Psalm in Hebrews 1:8 leaves no doubt that the early church took the Psalm to be Messianic. This double-entendre is captured in vv 6-7, where the distinction between the king and Christ is blurred. The psalm pulsates with life and points forward to the relationship between Christ, the groom, and the Church, his bride.

Point out their sin

I’ve never met anyone who enjoys confronting others. Even calling it by the more positive term, admonishing, doesn’t make the task any more enjoyable. Telling another person that we have been hurt by them, slighted, felt abused or sinned against is just an unpleasant, difficult conversation to have; a conversation that most of us would prefer to avoid. It is as if we feel that we have a duty to “suck it up”; to absorb the pain of the other. We may even feel as if we are at fault for feeling slighted.

Loving God and Man

The foremost theme throughout the Bible is one of love. We see threads about God’s sacrificial love for sinful man woven throughout the Scriptures. But the theme of love also includes commands for us to love God and our fellow man.

The most important commandment in the central text of Judaism was this: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.”

Unity Brings Rejuvenation

Short, but powerful and evocative–that’s my description of Psalm 133. I might also add, easily read, but difficult to put into practice. Unity among the people of God is that great allusive goal that seems to always disappear around the next bend in the road. But there God has commanded his blessing, if we could only reach that blessed state.

The psalmist uses two metaphors to portray this good and pleasant state of affairs.

You Big Bully

As a young boy I was often bullied at school. Interestingly enough it was never by one person alone but always by a group. It seems that children aren’t that brave when they’re alone but put them with a few other bullies and they get quite courageous.

Jesus wasn’t a hard person to find. He walked around town quite openly. He didn’t have bodyguards.

If I Were Jesus I Would…

As a child I once had a dream about the grade 9 boys who bullied me. In the dream I was walking home from school when a group of boys ran up to me and started harassing me. They grabbed my school bag and emptied the contents out on the street. They took my prized baseball cap and passed it around for each one to try on. They pushed me backwards to make me fall. But that was the first part of dream.

The Commandments of Love

The law came with Moses. Grace and truth came with the Messiah. Yet Jesus himself not only brought grace and truth, he was the fulfillment of the law. He did not abolish it, he completed it.

We are not damned for our inability to keep the commandments in the Old Testament.