If you lived in Jonah’s day and he came to your door asking for help—help for his soul—what might you say to him?
First you would want to see the good in him, and there is plenty of good. Hard-hearted people usually don’t receive words from the Lord, so he was a worthy prophet. And he volunteered to be thrown to his death in a devouring sea so others could be spared. I think that is very impressive, even though the storm was basically his doing. Ugh, it reminds me how I don’t like the idea of drowning, and it is hard for me to imagine that I would volunteer for it.
How convenient. A proof text for polite revenge. This doesn’t sound very nice, unless having burning coals on your head is a good thing.
If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head. (Romans 12:20, citing Proverbs 25:21-22)
Why is there so much interest in violent sex? I’m not talking about rape; I’m talking about consensual sex between adults that involves pain and sometimes domination. I read two articles quite a while ago and they still have me reeling. They appeared as book reviews in The Atlantic Monthly (January/February 2011).
This one has always been with us. Decades ago, I remember a man who went through an ugly divorce in which he never really looked at his own culpability. A couple of years later, he called and said he had finally found the answer! He left a message on my phone and said that we needed to meet immediately. Always a sucker for a request that has a note of drama and intrigue, I set up a time to meet.
“Hello, I am a moralistic therapeutic deist.” That’s the word from a number of evangelical teens.
I really liked that phrase when I first read it, though it seemed a little clunky. It was introduced by the 2005 book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. After listening to about 3,000 interviews the authors suggested that evangelical teens describe their beliefs this way:
The Apostle Paul wrote, “Continue in what you have learned and become convinced of” (2 Timothy 3:14) because he knew some who had not continued.
We share his concerns. We share them especially for our children as they become increasingly independent. Statistics vary widely but one thing is clear, many children who were raised in Christian homes leave the faith they once professed.
I first noticed it when an up-and-coming executive was caught embezzling money. He knew the system. He didn’t need the money; he didn’t even care about money. And, he knew he would get caught. His embezzling had nothing to do with stealing and greed. Instead, he was moving quickly toward dizzying heights of success; hope was rising too—and he had to kill it. In the confusing world of fallen humanity, everything can be turned upside down and backwards. In his case, hope was a threat that had to be eliminated.
Truth in I John is not a relative or self-generated abstraction. It is a changeless reality that breaks into our world in the Person of Jesus Christ. First John teaches us that the most important question anyone can ask is, "What do you think of Jesus?" This seminar will explore how the answer to that question reveals a person's relation to the truth.
My wife and I have no gold in our house, as long as you don’t count our wedding rings. What we had was stolen a few years ago and we never replaced it. Now our daughter and her family have no gold in their house either. With the soaring price of gold and our culture’s insatiable need for more drugs, a thoughtful burglar found a way to break in without breaking windows, kindly left my daughter’s wedding pearls, and took all jewelry of value. All gold is gone. We are told that the jewelry is probably being Fed Ex’d to Nevada where it will rendezvous with a lot of other stolen jewelry and then get back into circulation so it can be enjoyed by someone else.
