Reflections on God … Man … Life
Of all the words Jesus spoke from the cross, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me,” had to be the ones of greatest personal anguish. Why? What makes these words so searing? The key is the word “forsaken.” We must stop and consider the depth of this anguish and why it is so. In order to do this, we have to draw from the rest of Scripture the reason why this would be so devastating. The Father, Son,… Read more »
“Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad; for a tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. The good man brings good things out of his good store of treasure, and the evil man brings evil things out of his evil store of treasure…. Read more »
One practice I’ve incorporated into morning devotions is to read excerpts from devotional works throughout the history of the church. They are varied, ranging from the very early years to twentieth-century followers of Christ. Most recently, I’ve been reading selections from the journal of John Woolman, an American Quaker of the eighteenth century. At the end of the reading this morning, I was struck by his comments after meeting with fellow Quakers who owned slaves. Woolman was passionately opposed to… Read more »
My upper-level history adjunct offering this semester at Southeastern University is a course I’ve taught only once before but am eager to do so again. It’s the final one I developed when I was full-time at the university: Religion and the Presidents. The aim is to examine and analyze each president’s religious beliefs (or sometimes the lack thereof) and personal character to see how those beliefs showed up in their personal lives and in their public policies when they became… Read more »
A phrase I’ve heard throughout my life, “putting the cart before the horse,” comes to mind for me when I survey the Christian response to politics in our day. Or at least the response that many Christians are making with respect to the current political scene. The phrase means “reversing the proper order of things,” and I see that more and more. Christians should always put the Gospel and the Kingdom of God before anything else, and we can sometimes… Read more »
As part of my teaching responsibilities for my church, I have an adult Sunday class that I offer ten months out of the year. The goal of this class is to dig deeply into Scripture. In September, I began a series on 1 Corinthians 13, the famous Love Chapter. It has taken three months to navigate it in as detailed a fashion as I can, and the final session is this Sunday. I began the series with C. S. Lewis’s… Read more »
Three years ago, at a C. S. Lewis conference at Wheaton College’s Marion E. Wade Center, I met a Romanian professor, Dr. Denise Vasiliu, who talked with me about the Lewis society she had helped inaugurate at a Romanian university. She had the distinction of being the first Romanian student whose doctoral dissertation was on Lewis, and she hoped that I would be able to speak at one of their conferences. I was immediately caught up in her vision for… Read more »