Raising kids is a lot like negotiating with terrorists.
Trying to work things out with your children, helping them see that you’ve got to work out a balance between everything you need to get done versus everything they want to get (and get done). Even teenagers who understand this are always trying to tip the scale in their favor. They can be relentless. Raising kids is a lot like negotiating with terrorists.
Who Cleans Your Classroom?
This last Sunday in my sermon, I talked about how looking at life through the lens of Jesus Christ changes the way we see the hierarchies and pecking orders our society lives by. The cross shatters the labels we use: achievers vs. slackers, brilliant minds vs. not the sharpest tools in the shed; winners vs. losers. The ways of God are not our ways, and the Biblical witness is that those the world overlooks are very often the ones God uses to bring attention to His power and wisdom.
This is an illustration I came across last week. I was preaching about how the gospel of Jesus Christ shows up in so many of our great stories. The gospel is about what God has done for us—all that we cannot and could not do for ourselves—has been done through the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is good news—it is joyous news. Talk about joyous news…Ice Cream is good for you! Even if we don’t know why.
When trying to illustrate a point in my preaching, I try to find topics that are non-controversial or at least non-partisan. This last week I used the idea of Gun Rights vs. Responsible restrictions on those rights to talk about the balance between Rights and Responsibilities. I’m sure there are going to be folks who think I leaned too far one way or the other when describing the debate. In any case, I kept trying to come up with an example that might highlight how those on the Left also want to defend certain rights and ignore responsibilities. This is what I came up with but—with a sermon much longer than it should be—didn’t have space for.
Archived Posts
Back and Forth with Chat GPT
Many of you know that I’ve found a new consultant to bounce my ideas off in regard to preaching. My good buddy Chat GPT and I sometimes disagree—often miscommunicate—but usually come up with some fruitful illustrations.
One More Thing About Becoming Wholly Human
I was talking Sunday about the work of Hare and Woods and their idea of ‘the survival of the friendliest.’ Essentially, they conclude that “our greatest evolutionary advantage wasn't that we could do everything ourselves. It was that we could do things together.”
Here’s a preview of our congregation’s Core Values
In the coming weeks we will be exploring the importance of presence, prayers, gifts, service, witness, and growth in grace. These are at the heart of what we commit to when we join a Wesleyan grace-led church like ours. But we choose to broaden them out and state them in a new way…
The Biblical prayer we don’t know what to do with
Psalm 137 is written by people who have experienced catastrophic loss.
They have been conquered...
Patience and Trust
Sunday, in my benediction (which traditional folks did not hear) I talked about the Marshmallow Test. The original results of that test with children was that those who could delay gratification did better in life than those who could not.