Advent Day 10: Matthew 10: Following Jesus is an Upside Down Business

Eugene Peterson wrote, in his book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, "Jesus' imagery, to be followed soon by his sacrifice, is totally counter to our culture of more, more. Could Jesus have made it any clearer? We don't become more, we become less. Instead of grasping more tightly to whatever we value, we let…

Daily Office: July 1, 2014

And isn’t it funny who gets upset when Jesus does these things? You know, those who seem to have the most to lose–that is, their power. I love how Jesus simply loves, welcomes, and heals people and in so doing strips away the power of the powerful who will not.

500 Words with Luke’s Gospel: Praying

I will be honest: I struggle with prayer. Eugene Peterson wrote in one of his books that's quite OK if we struggle and that when we don't have words the Holy Spirit prays for us. Many people struggle, yet for some reason I find little comfort in that. For some reason this is the one…

Eugene Peterson on Jesus

“There was hardly anything I did that did not involve language: the Word of God provided not information but revelation. Jesus told stories and taught and prayed, not to entertain us or inspire us but to draw us into a participating, believing, listening, loving way of life that was, above all, local and personal: prayerful.…

That Kind of Faith

Reflections on Pentecost Sunday, May 31, 2009 “Faith has to do with marrying Invisible and Visible. When we engage in an act of faith we give up control, we give up sensory (sight, hearing, etc.) confirmation of reality; we give up insisting on head knowledge as our primary means of orientation in life. The positive…

De-Sanitizing the Parables: The Parable of the Soils, pt 1

This installment of the De-Sanitizing the Parables series will explore the Parable of the Soil found in Matthew 13. However, before I explore the parable itself, I’d like to give some background on the nature of the parables found in Scripture. To do this, we will listen to two different scholars who give us some…

Lectionary Notes 1 John 4 7 21

In my ongoing series of posts on the current lectionary readings, I offer you these notes on 1 John 4:7-21. There are notes from DA Carson, Eugene Peterson, I Howard Marshall, Craig Keener, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and David Jackman among others. The notes focus mainly on John’s call to his congregation to love one another as…

Lectionary Study Notes: Acts 4:5-12, May 3, 2009

Friends, Here is my second installment of study notes for this week’s lectionary readings. This one focuses on Acts 4:5-12. The study focuses on the Spirit’s role, the Name, and the Exclusivity.  Quotes from William Willimon, Richard Philips, John Stott, Robert Tannehill, LJ Olgivie, DA Carson, Eugene Peterson, Aijith Fernando, Mark Driscoll, and more. There…

5 Sermons on Resurrection

Friends, Since it is the holiday season of Resurrection, I thought perhaps some of you might be interested in or might benefit from some Resurrection sermons. I  preached these sermons about 3 years ago shortly after I preached a series called The Crucifixion Driven Life. These sermons were inspired by a book that I read…

Skycast: Filling a Cup from a Waterfall, 2 Samuel 9:1-12

Friends, here is the audio for the manuscript printed below (in the previous post). This is a sermon about God’s grace as expressed in the person of David, king of Israel. It is a sermon about the unmerited kindness that David demonstrated towards Mephibosheth, the grandson of David’s enemy, Saul. It is a picture of…

Like Filling a Cup From a Waterfall

Like Filling a Cup from a Waterfall 2 Samuel 9:1-12 Introduction David asked, “Is there anyone still left of the house of Saul to whom I can show kindness for Jonathan’s sake?” Now there was a servant of Saul’s household named Ziba. They called him to appear before David, and the king said to him,…

Jesus, Kingdoms, and the Spirit (Luke 4)

Jesus, Kingdoms, and the Spirit Genesis 3, Luke 4 In my daily reading today, I found myself reflecting on the previous 3 chapters of Luke’s Gospel as I read the fourth chapter of Luke’s Gospel. As I did, I remembered a significant feature that begins each chapter. It goes something like this. In chapter 1…

Skycast: The Unveiling of Jesus to the Church

Friends, I am happy to announce to you that along with my weekly sermons, I will begin doing a series of podcasts here at Life Under the Blue Sky. The first series of podcasts I have scheduled will be from the book of the Revelation. I will not be covering the entire book, but rather…

Jesus Wants to Save Christians, pt 1

“My concern is provoked by the observation that so many who understand themselves to be followers of Jesus, without hesitation, and apparently without thinking, embrace the ways and means of the culture as they go about their daily living ‘in Jesus’ name.’ But the ways that dominate our culture have been developed either in ignorance…

Eugene Peterson on the Word

Friends, Here’s a quote from Eugene Peterson’s book on the Revelation Reversed Thunder: The subtlest and most common attack in the satanic assault on God’s ways among us is a subversion of the word. This subversion unobtrusively disengages our imagination from God’s word and gets us to think of it as something wonderful in print,…