Each time I thought about the passage of Scripture that Jesus said to His first disciples, “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men,” I had assumed He was talking about evangelism and that evangelism was about telling the message and convincing others to follow Jesus. Similarly, I thought Jesus’ emphasis was about catching men, fishing for people and also that evangelism was about the bait, the content of the message, and about reeling men in, the delivery and so on.

“Fishers of men” might really have to do with going out to where there might be a lot men, and making the effort to bring them to know the Lord. But, the other day, as I was sitting and listening a sermon about the story of the young boy in the sixth chapter of John, there was a “connecting of the dots” in my mind. It occurred to me that the phrase “fishers of men” might have a lot to do with what happened that day about the boy with the fish and the loaves. Read the rest of this entry »

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Awhile back, I wrote about the message that my church pastor preached on that struck a chord with me. It was a message he preached from the first six verses of the gospel of Matthew.

What I found especially remarkable was that in the designs of God, He included four women with rather questionable pasts in the lineage of the Messiah’s ancestry. What is remarkable is that in the customs of the day, ancestral records do not typically include females, let alone broken, messy ones.

Yet, in a Gospel that purportedly was supposed to set the record for Israel that Jesus is the Promised Messiah, what do we find but the evidence that the Messiah’s ancestry included four women who had less than perfect histories? If we were to include Mary as well, that would make five women ancestors with messy life-stories.

This demonstrates the heart of God: He sent His Son into the world, as the Apostle Paul declares, to save sinners. Read the rest of this entry »

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Is forgiveness linked to religiosity? Apparently, scholars and researchers seem to think so. As this article highlighted, those who are religious find it particularly easier to forgive others who have wronged them.

As the article pointed out, recent events such as the deadly October 2006 Esperanza Fire (for the Wikipedia entry, see here), etc.) and the Amish school shooting earlier in the same month highlighted horrendous perpetrations that defies both our capacity to imagine and to forgive. Read the rest of this entry »

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It’s time to talk, says Dr. Bob Cornwall, Pastor of the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) of Lompoc, and columnist of the Lompoc Record. This well articulated post, in the SOMA blog is a rewrite of an equally well-thought out reflective op-ed piece on the Lompoc Record.

I resonate with Dr Cornwall’s call to talk - for those of us who call ourselves evangelicals - to no longer hide behind our discomfort of those who are different from us. There is so much we can talk about. For instance, I often wonder why is it that we find it so hard to forgive sexual sin.

Why is it that respectable leaders can be hot-tempered, or haughty, or even arrogant, and yet they can continue to capture society’s respect and hold positions of leadership and power even in the church. Yet, if someone is entangled in sexual impropriety, we have a completely different view of such people?

Why the double standard?

For instance, as I have pointed out elsewhere, Read the rest of this entry »

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Recently, my wife read aloud Romans chapter 1 to the family. As I listened to her, I was struck by how Paul addressed himself as a “servant of Jesus Christ“. It is not a common phrase used today, but the New Testament is filled with such references used either by the writers themselves or in referring to a group of Christ followers. In some translations, the phrase used is “bond-servant”, which is likened to the practice of the Hebrew who took on bond servants in their households.

These servants are sometimes also known as slaves, but I believe they have some key differences between slavery in biblical times and slavery as we understand it today. I recall Parableman once did an extensive study of the morality of slavery. While the study was insightful and I am sure highlighted many valid points, I also remember being quite uncomfortable with some of his conclusions. I am not sure if the claims he made are widely held among scholars, but basically (if I remember correctly) it goes something like this: Read the rest of this entry »

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“Fearing God,” says Susan L. Prince, one of my commenters, “is a hard concept to grasp, and I can’t help but wonder if the Church, and it’s lack of practicing what it preaches, is what causes Christians to not properly fear.” Another commenter, The Artist, suggested that instead of fear, we might construe it as “an `overwhelming awe’ at `God’s Immensity’”. Both, I believe are expressing the difficulty that I have explored in previous posts on this topic.

In my first post in this series, I described the tension between the concept of “fear of the LORD” and “the perfect love” of God that drives out fear. In my next couple of posts, I began to unpack what Psalm 34 teaches about “fear of the LORD”. According to the Psalmist, fearing God is not just about Read the rest of this entry »

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In my previous post in this series, I explored what Psalm 34: 11-22 says are the practical outworking of fearing God. Surprisingly (or not) this is not merely an emotional response of shrinking away from the presence of God timorously, or a paralyzing forboding of judgment or punishment over our failure to meet the high standards of a holy, angry God.

There is fear, and there is fear…
As I pointed out earlier, having such kinds of fear seems to contradict Read the rest of this entry »

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In an earlier post, I questioned what “the fear of the LORD” really means in practice. Some of my commenters have offered answers. I think their stabs at the answer are in the right direction.

Like them, I believe our relationship with God is multi-faceted, and approaching God in an attitude of fear cannot be done in isolation from the posture of love, gratitude and boldness that the Scriptures also teach as necessary attitudes. I like my commenters say about adopting a rational and wholesome reverence and awe in our relationship to God.

Key to Understanding the Fear of God
Recently while meditating on the Psalms, I found further light from Psalm 34 on this subject. According to this passage, Read the rest of this entry »

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