As we move into November we move into the season of thanksgiving. We begin next Sunday as we give thanks for the saints who have gone on before – the men and women of First UMC whose lives served as living letters from Christ to the world and to each
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The Beatitudes don’t make a whole lot of sense for people like us who live in this crazy and frenzied world that is so focused on self: always focusing on protecting ourselves, watching out for number one, nurturing our sense of self-entitlement. In our world blessings are given to people
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With our examination Sunday of the final phrases of the Lord’s Prayer, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” we complete our reflection together on this precious legacy of our faith. As I said on Sunday, while we may be done talking about it together on Sundays,
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Our examination of the Lord’s Prayer draws to a close this week as we encounter the phrase “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil….” (we will close out the series on prayer on October 28 as we look together at prayer always and for everything). In
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In my daily Bible reading for Sunday I came across this challenging section of Luke 13, which I read in Eugene Petersen’s translation, The Message. Jesus is speaking in response to the question, “Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?” He probably surprised them with this answer:
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As we move through the sermon series on The Lord’s Prayer I’ve asked you to pray it at least once each day, as a way of allowing God to shape you more closely into all God would have you be. I have also been praying it, apart from my sermon
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The books of Ezra and Nehemiah in the Bible tell about the end of the exile of the Jews in Babylon. They had been away from home for a long time, and when they were released and reached the city of Jerusalem they discovered that the walls of the city
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Last Sunday’s message was about “attending upon all the ordnances of God” — choosing to practice those spiritual disciplines that enable us to experience God’s abundant, outrageous love and that also make us more able to love God back. Those ordnances include: The public worship of God The ministry of
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