Author: Ian
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Enduring Soil
I’ve read the Parable of the Sower many times. I’ve preached on it. Heard plenty of sermons on it. Verse 15 hit me today. What struck me this time, in particular, was “endurance”. When you go back and re-read the parable, endurance makes sense. It may indeed be the point of the entire parable. Developing…
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Hanging on by a strand
Seth Godin recently posted the following… There are three strands, present for most everyone: Power (sometimes seen as status, or the appearance of status) Safety (survival and peace of mind) Meaning (hope and the path forward) The changes in our media structure, public health and economy have pushed some people to overdo one or the…
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Know Yourself. Know Your Idol.
The two latest tragedies that are in front of me are the school shooting in Texas, and the abuse scandal unraveling in another Christian denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. Both are incredibly painful. They should be. They are another example of how humanity has fallen and how determined, it seems, humanity is to stay mired…
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Movie About a Christian
Read: Luke 9:18–50 One of the reasons I love and appreciate the concept of the “church year” is that we are often confronted by the hard passages, especially those that often make no sense to our post-enlightenment (i.e., science- and data-driven) minds. This is, as you probably inferred, one of those days. Today is Transfiguration…
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How to Come Back
1 Corinthians 11:17–33 It’s almost over it seems. The time of being masked and constrained nears its end. On the other hand, already another strain of COVID is showing up, but the reality is that we, as an entire world, are at our limits. It seems great that we’re almost there, except that we really…
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Future Tensely
Psalm 126; Isaiah 40:1-11; Romans 8:22-25 Have you realized that Advent is weird? I love Advent, don’t get me wrong. However, the world has done a successful job of retraining us on what Advent is all about. Partially, I think, this is because of the image of an unthreatening baby Jesus with lambs, other baby…
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Seeing Christ In The Lives of Others
Romans 12:16–21 As part of our college ministry many years ago, we asked our college students to come up with their mission statement. It was coached in a business/organization language; it should have been better phrased as a Rule of Life. Mine was: Seeing Christ in the Lives of Others. Yes, the title was my…
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A Movement: Of Priest and Temple
…if we…focus too much on the outside, the temple comes crumbling down, for the internal structure cannot hold up the facade shown to the world, and we then dishonor God by our fallen temple.