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Exodus 15:22-27

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Lora Copley

Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider Three days is a long time to go without finding water, especially if you have little ones under four. Nursing mothers are beginning to get desperate. When water is sighted, the kids run to it, laughing, whooping, but just a taste leaves them gagging, spluttering, wiping their tongues on…

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2 Kings 6

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Lora Copley

Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider. What do we do with the people we can’t stand? The co-worker who daily makes you look stupid. The classmate who gets the glory for your hard work. The brother-in-law who always has to get his way. Pick up a pop magazine in any grocery checkout lane and you’ll…

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2 Chronicles 20:1-30

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Lora Copley

Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider Firm places often prove otherwise. Stand on financial security? One Wall Street crisis and retirements are on sinking sand. Stand on your strength of your heroes? Say it ain’t so, Joe, but even childhood idols like Lance or Tiger leave us disappointed. Stand on national defense? See 9-11. Stand…

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Ecclesiastes 3:1-11

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Lora Copley

Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider. Ever been to a Corn Maze? If you look at the maze from the outside, the perimeter, it looks like a harmless old corn field.  Very different when you view it from smack in the middle, the inside, trying to find your way. And of course, the view is…

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Psalm 71:1-6

Epiphany 4C

Doug Bratt Headshot
Doug Bratt

Psalm 71 seems to be an elderly person’s plea for God’s help in dealing with his enemies. While some scholars see this as aging King David’s prayer, the identity of the psalm’s author is not essential to the psalm. In fact, James Mays calls its language “plastic.” By that he seems to suggest that the…

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Jeremiah 1:4-10

Epiphany 4C

Scott-Hoezee
Scott Hoezee

My wife mentions this semi-often. For her, it’s a combination of envy and consternation. The issue is vocation, “calling,” and it crops up in conversation between the two of us whenever someone asks me once again to tell my “call story” to be a minister or in case some other preacher—in the course of a…

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Genesis 4:1-14

HDJ
Heidi De Jonge

This is a story about the other side of Eden, a story about life and death, a story about brothers, a story about God. An introduction to this text could highlight current stories of life and death – stories that make it clear that we are for life and against death.  When I preached on…

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Genesis 45

HDJ
Heidi De Jonge

The Joseph narrative comes to a climax in Genesis 45.  In reflecting on Joseph’s story up to this point, one can see that Joseph was both a wounded man and a broken man.  He was wounded, certainly, by the loss of his mother, by the mistreatment of his brothers, by the mischaracterization by Potiphar’s wife,…

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Numbers 13

HDJ
Heidi De Jonge

Here in Numbers 13, the Israelites have arrived at the southern border of the Promised Land.  Ever since the days that they left Egypt, this is where they were heading.  The land was the gift that God had promised them.  This was “the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites” (13:1, emphasis…

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Judges 13:1-16

HDJ
Heidi De Jonge

In its introduction to the book of Judges, my NIV Study Bible summarizes Samson’s life this way: “a lone hero from the tribe of Dan who delivers Israel from oppression from the west” (p. 324).  The book of Judges is sometimes seen as a book of heroes, with Samson in all of his strength, standing…

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