When I was kid, I learned all about Jesus’ miracles from boards covered in flannel. An old Egyptian woman named Anna would use tiny—also flannel—cutouts of biblical characters to painstakingly illustrate the story of Jesus raising Lazarus, walking on water, or feeding the five thousand. This was great because watching Anna stick the fuzzy characters to blue board taught me the basic stories of my faith. The unfortunate side effect was that after a while,...
It’s cold in Johannesburg. That surprised me because I always thought Africa was a hot place. That was the first of my expectations dashed upon the rocks of reality there. Accompanied by ten people, including seven high school students, I walked around an astonishingly large ghetto with bags of bread and canned foods. To be honest, it felt like a bad joke. I was walking around a neighborhood that contained a dumbfounding 1 million impoverished,...
Since the beginning of time this world has been dealing with sin and its consequences. Adam and Eve’s fall in the garden leads to many consequences – setting us up for a lifetime of relationship struggles that was not in God’s original plan. As life plays out we watch and see disastrous things start to happen – murder, theft, idolatry, and promiscuity with sexual behavior. God leads His people: in the Exodus movement, and finally...
We came, we cleaned, we conquered. This weekend our small group, armed with Clorox and Windex, stormed the church, leaving no cranny unclean. For a few months now, we’ve brainstormed ways to become more engaged members of the congregation, and adding our names to the cleaning rotation seemed a good place to start. Saturday was our inaugural cleaning day. Top to bottom we mopped, vacuumed, dusted and disinfected, and by the end, the whole place...
On Saturday, celebrated singer Whitney Houston was found dead in her Beverly Hilton hotel room—her body submerged in bathwater, bottles of prescription pills close by. The story is still developing, and like many celebrity death tales, will probably remain steeped in scandal and speculation. In the meantime, there are some theological takeaways. Death has a way of bringing out the good, the bad, and the gospel. Whitney’s talents point to God as gift-giver. Whitney took...
NT Wright’s new book, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, is due out this upcoming March. I was able to send Prof. Wright a few questions about this forthcoming book for the blog and he graciously agreed to answer them for The Two Cities. My questions are highlighted in bold: 1) Where does your new book, How God Became King, fit within your previous works? In one sense it simply fills in some...
Ask a Calvinist when he was saved and he might take you back—waaaay back—to “before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4). Nice one! Five points for being profound. But we Calvinists need not always rewind so far. Truth is, there was a time when we were not Christians. When we were dead in our sins, under Satan’s sway and God’s wrath, unwilling and unable to love the Lord (Ephesians 2:1-3). It’s OK to acknowledge...
I can recall growing up being told that I should avoid ‘looking like the World.’ The idea was more assumed than ever really explained. Consistently though I was told I was out of line in regards to music. At the Christian school I attended in Jr. High and High School we were told that electrical instruments were evil; the most vile of all being the drums. The problem was that I was a budding electric...
Before my title causes you to misunderstand my position, I want to say a few things. I like guns. I really do. It is part of the reason that I have a concealed weapons permit. More then that, I believe in self-defense. If someone enters my home to harm either myself or my soon to be wife, I will dispense the appropriate deadly force. Yet my belief in the use of force in one area...
Dear Bryan, You’re probably at the piano, writing songs about things you know nothing about, like love and loss. Or doing vocal warm-ups so you can audition for that blasted show choir. (Don’t bother. You won’t make it until your senior year, and when you do, you’ll become a bigger nerd than you already are.) I do hope you’ll find time for this letter. I’m writing from the future, of course, to warn you about...
Recent Comments