*Given at Midtown Christian Community, Sept. 16, 2006* Isaiah 50:4-9 James 2:1-5,8-10,14-18 Mark 8:27-38 Psalm 116 When we read the stories of the Bible that involve good and bad characters, we pretty much always associate ourselves with the good characters.  It’s easy to do this, since, even if we have a fairly low image of […]

One of my favorite U2 songs is “The Wanderer.”  It’s not too well-known outside of U2 fan-dom, but it’s brilliant in so many ways and on so many levels.  It is the final song on the Zooropa album, released in the midst of U2’s highly experimental phase during which, according to Christian Scharen, the band […]

I’ve been thinking lately about the bigness, richness, and deepness of the gospel—its profundity and capacity to meet any and every moment.  Sometimes the gospel talks about forgiveness and sometimes community transformation.  Sometimes it rebukes and sometimes it comforts.  God transformed history’s darkest  and most unjust moment into the birth of the new world in […]

I wrote yesterday that the gospel speaks a variety of voices.  The reality of what God has done in Christ and by the Spirit is so large and high and deep and wide that it isn’t captured by any singular formula.  The gospel is always meeting and transforming every situation it encounters—always devastating and renewing, […]

Because the gospel is talk about what God has done in Christ, it must be multi-faceted, diverse, and versatile.  The gospel speaks with many voices.  That’s not to say that there are different gospels or that there are different “takes” on the gospel that are mutually contradictory.  Nothing like that at all. I mean that […]

*Given at Midtown Christian Community, one year ago today* What in the world are we doing here as Midtown?  We’re a group of friends committed to one another and committed to loving one another in the name of Jesus.  And we’ve committed ourselves to one another because God committed himself to us.  We’re a community […]

In Rom. 1:13-15 Paul tells the Roman Christians of his long-held desire to visit them.  He uses two expressions to speak of his ministry that are often misunderstood because of narrowed conceptions of the Christian gospel.  I’ll quote here the NIV and CEB translations of these verses and highlight these expressions. I do not want […]

Scot McKnight cites lessons that can be learned from John Stott’s exemplary life and ministry. See also the piece in Christianity Today, this tribute from The Bible Society (UK), and the obituary in The Guardian, which, according to Steve Walton, was the paper Stott read.

That’s the name of a great song from The Smiths and it’s the theme of Russell Jacoby’s second chapter in his book Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence From Cain and Abel to the Present.  I found it strikingly instructive, or at least illustrative, of fundamentalist and evangelical in-fighting. Jacoby notes that throughout history civil […]

Paul frames his letter to the Romans with his apostolic mission—to bring about the obedience of faith among the nations, acting as an agent of God’s restoration of the nations (Rom. 1:5; 16:26). One of the most damaging aspects of an evangelical vision of the Christian gospel is the bifurcation between faith and obedience.  Paul […]