1 Peter Can Be A Little Tough…
a guest blog by Shawn Blythe The first book of Peter is not a particularly easy read. There is a lot of talk about suffering and encouragement for us to submit ourselves to others. Nobody likes to be told to submit and few people like to suffer. To be fair, Peter is not exactly breaking new ground here as the basic theological precepts are also covered by others – most notably by Paul in his letters to the Ephesians and Colossians. But
The Mission Continues
If you’re following along with our bible reading plan (and I encourage you to!), tomorrow, we wrap up the book of Acts. As we started Acts, I mentioned that Acts 1:8 (“…you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth”) functions as a sort of table of contents for the book (as it starts in Jerusalem, goes to Judea and then Samaria, and ends in Rome as ‘the ends of the earth’) – but
Missing Out with Bernice
A guest blog by Shawn Blythe The opportunity to make a difference in any one person’s life can often be a singular event. We cross paths with somebody only once and then both parties continue along their respective paths. In some cases, the encounter may be memorable or even life-changing while in other cases the intersection is inconsequential and quickly forgotten. Bernice crossed paths with Paul only once in Caesarea on or around the year 60 AD. She had already experienced a
Scripture is Script
At the end of the last sermon series (the Off the Shelf series), I introduced the idea that the story of scripture is the one true story of the world – that each of our own stories (and every other story) finds its meaning in. As that story, it is something like a six act play, where the majority of the 5th act is missing – and it is our role to “improvise” the rest of the 5th act, playing our part faithfully. I first heard
Jason’s Houseguests
a guest blog by Shawn Blythe We have all experienced the joys and travails of having a houseguest. Sometimes their departure comes with tears of sorrow that your time together is coming to an end, while other times they are tears of joy for the very same reason. There are plenty of occasions where Benjamin Franklin’s statement that “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days” seems unfortunately appropriate. Although pre-dating this statement by a significant number of years, Paul would