Thursday, March 29, 2018

Kissing the Easter Bunny Good-bye on Resurrection Day

Right now our churches are primarily Olympian. And while every person has both an Olympian and a Christian personality, right now even within each of us Christians our Olympian personality dominates. The influence of the painfully Olympian Global Technological System (GTS) is just that strong.

Mercifully, Jesus Christ decisively defeated all the powers of evil—including the conventional yet false Olympian gods behind the GTS. What’s more, his steadfast love endures forever and his faithfulness knows no bounds. Consequently, he persists in calling his churches back to him. He even calls and enables you and me to live as prophetic Christian witnesses tasked with showing his churches the differences between serving the gods and serving him. Today we will reflect briefly on the differences between Easter and Resurrection Day.

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

When Going to Church Is a Disastrous Distraction (Mark 11:15-18)

This is the week of Passover. Pilgrims from many lands are pouring into the holy city of Jerusalem. One important reason: to have a priest sacrifice an animal on their behalf in the Temple, the holiest place on Earth, as prescribed by the law of Moses.

To help these thousands of foreign visitors make the prescribed sacrifices, moneychangers inside the outer court of the Temple take their foreign coins and exchange them for Temple shekels. Pilgrims then take these shekels and choose which animals they wish to have sacrificed on their behalf. All the animals available inside the outer court are guaranteed to be clean, unblemished, and acceptable to the priests.

Monday, March 26, 2018

When Going to Church is Good but Not Enough (Jeremiah 7:3-11)

In 721 BC, Yahweh allowed an Assyrian army to destroy the Kingdom of Israel because the people of Israel had stubbornly abandoned him for other gods. With that destruction, those ten northern tribes disappeared from history. When they abandoned their meaning, they lost their existence.

One hundred years later, the Kingdom of Judah faced catastrophe for the same reason. But Yahweh didn’t want to lose them too. To avoid that, he sent Jeremiah to speak liberating if irritating words of truth to his people.