if the son has set you free, you are free indeed. Once freedom has been offered by God himself; once he has our attention, I expect Jesus to spell out, in 5 steps or less, what it might mean to live as a free man. If I’m lucky, maybe all the steps will rhyme, or…
If the Son has set you free, you are free indeed. Some things that Jesus said are, to put it mildly, insane. It’s hard to justify the wisdom of a spiritual leader, a rabbi, a paragon of virtue, and more generally, somebody who could be described as “having it all together,” when he runs around…
the kingdom of God is in the midst of you. The teachers of the law were the ones who were supposed to get it. The teachers of the law hadn’t the faintest idea of what was right under their noses. Much has changed since the days when Jesus walked the earth but at least this…
Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. A month and a half earlier, the Hebrews were slaves…
The past week has been a whirlwind for me as a writer. I remember just over a week ago telling a new friend about the “book deal” I’ve had in place. Have you ever thought about just how ridiculous that might sound, telling strangers about a book that has– as of then– no physical presence?…
Years ago, my friend Brian told me a story about Harriet Tubman, a black woman who escaped to the North at the brink of the Civil War. Tubman is famous for her work in the “Underground Railroad,” which consisted largely of her 19 visits back to the South to free slaves during America’s bloodiest time.…
Are you truly free? This question has been with me all weekend, as I have kept coming back to the very nature of slavery, freedom and covenant. Did Jesus come to live this life for me, die my death for me, raise to new life for me, mediate for me in the presence of God…
I was talking with my new friend Phil over a cup of coffee when he brought up a word I had not thought of since my days as a seminarian- they seem so long ago. Somehow the conversation led to us talking about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, fear, freedom and the God who is for us (That…
Surely we are named after Christ, not because he is absent from us, but because he dwells in us, that is, because we believe in him and are Christs to one another and do to our neighbors as Christ does to us. But in our day we are taught by the doctrine of men to…
Follow me, run along behind me! That is all. To follow in his steps is something which is void of all content. It gives us no intelligible program for a way of life, no goal or ideal to strive after…Jesus is the only significance. Beside Jesus nothing has any significance. He alone matters. –Bonhoeffer I…
