Movies for Preaching
Decalogue 1 (1989) – 2
Decalogue I (1989). Written by Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Directed by Kryszstof Kieslowski. Cinematography by Wieslaw Zdort. Music by Zbigniew Preisner. Starring Henryk Baranowski , Maja Komorowska, and Wojciech Klata. Facets Edition. Rating: G, 56 mins. Rotten Tomatoes: 100%. In the late 1980s in Poland, two fellows put together what is generally recognized as…
Decalogue 1 (1989)
Decalogue I (1989). Written by Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Directed by Kryszstof Kieslowski. Cinematography by Wieslaw Zdort. Music by Zbigniew Preisner. Starring Henryk Baranowski , Maja Komorowska, and Wojciech Klata. Facets Edition. Rating: G, 56 mins. Rotten Tomatoes: 100%. How to know God, if there is a God? This is the question that in…
The Thin Red Line (1998) – 4
The Thin Red Line (1998). Written and directed Terrence Malick. Starring James Caviezel, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, and Elias Koteas. 170 mins; rated R. Metacritic: 78%; Rotten Tomatoes: 79%. Pictures worth a thousand words? Sometimes maybe, especially when mixed with music. And then, perhaps, if done well, such can skin the soul alive, so to…
Wide Awake (1998) – 1
Wide Awake (1998). Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring Joseph Cross, Rosie O’Donnell, and Robert Loggia. Rated PG. 88 mins. Rotten Tomatoes 67%. The question of what actual love looks like has plagued humankind since, well, the beginning, whether that be Adam and Eve left to themselves in a garden or some humanoid…
Ida (2013)
Ida (2013). Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. Co-written by Pawel Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Starring Agata Kulesza and Agata Trzebuchowska. PG-13. 82 mins. Rotten Tomatoes 96%; Metacritic 91%. A young Polish novice, Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska), a WW II orphan raised in a convent, is summoned by the Abbess with the instruction to visit an aunt she…
Reading for Preaching
Mere Christianity in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics
“Ubiquity” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith
“Buechner” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith
Solzhenitsyn at Harvard: The Address, Twelve Early Responses, and Six Later Reflections
Gilead
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Night
Miracles: How God Intervenes in Human Affairs
Excerpts from the Diary of the Late God
Excerpts from the Diary of the Late God
The Young Lions
Night
“Reflection on Psalm 23”
Additional content related to God
Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19
Since I can detect no logical reason for skipping verses 5-11 as the Lectionary would have us to do, it makes sense to preach on the entire psalm as these 19 verses form a seamless whole. But I leave that up to you! In general, as a psalm in Eastertide, one could map this song…
Psalm 130
As we near the conclusion already of the 2026 Season of Lent, this Year A psalm selection serves up something that is quintessentially Lenten in nature. The entirety of this fairly short song deals with two linked realities: Our human need to be forgiven of our sins and God’s divine penchant to be a forgiving…
Genesis 32:22-31: That Face: Proper 13A
And so it has come to this. Jacob, the heel-grasper, the schemer, the wheeler and dealer, the sneak, the crook, the lie, the cheat: he’s coming home. Deception and wheedling stand on either side of the last twenty years, like bookends on Jacob’s life. He fled Canaan having deceived his old father, Isaac, and having…
Psalm 121
At a conference I attended recently, a woman who works as a psychologist and counselor addressed the topic of trauma in conversation with the Book of Psalms. She related a story from decades ago when her then-boyfriend became paralyzed following a devastating biking accident. In the midst of her grief and sorrow over this turn…
Psalm 99
The Lectionary gives us two choices for a psalm lection on Transfiguration Sunday in Year A. Both Psalm 2 and Psalm 99 work the same side of the street in terms of celebrating God as the ultimate King and then also the kings of Israel in Jerusalem who are God’s chosen representatives, who serve as…
Psalm 27:1, 4-9
The Lectionary is known for chopping up psalms and other passages. Sometimes the reasons are painfully obvious: we need to brush past sentiments about wicked people and pleas for God to deal with them severely. Let’s keep the Jesus who says nice things but bracket out his calling down woes on Chorazin and such. In…
Psalm 40:1-11
Psalm 40 is certainly one of the more curious of the psalms. The first 11 verses (which is all the Lectionary is directing us to) comprise an upbeat song of thanksgiving and praise to God. The psalmist claims to have waited patiently for God to come through for him and then God did. He lifted…
Psalm 146:5-10
However it was that the Virgin Mary composed her Magnificat song as recorded in Luke 1, one thing that is certain is that she had a lot of Old Testament material at her disposal to work from. Particularly she had many apt psalms to draw upon, and Psalm 146 is surely one of them. No…
Psalm 46
Many of us are old enough to remember that whatever preachers around the world and particularly in the United States had planned to preach on for Sunday September 16, 2001, all that changed after that fateful Tuesday now referred to by the shorthand of 9/11. And so very many of us who preach switched to…
Psalm 98
I come from an ecclesiastical tradition that for a long time shunned the singing of anything but settings of the 150 psalms in worship. Despite a burst of hymnody in the post-Reformation church world—think of names like Isaac Watt or the Wesleys—singing any text that was not straight out of the Psalter was verboten. Ironically…
Psalm 84:1-7
Psalm 84 is a lovely poem and song and at just a dozen verses, it’s a fairly short song at that. So why the RCL would have us take up only the first seven verses is a mystery to me. Aside from a passing reference to “the wicked,” verses 8-12 simply continue the radiant imagery…
Psalm 121
The reassurances of Psalm 121 notwithstanding, even most pious Christian parents have a common byword or saying for their children: “Nothing good happens after midnight.” This is the stuff that curfews are made of. Behind it is the belief that when the world grows dark, it grows dangerous. Under the cover of dark, certain things…
Psalm 111
Psalm 111 was written by somebody who pulled out every stop on the praise organ and then let it rip! In the span of just 10 verses, God is praised up and down, forward and back. God is extolled for the works of God’s hands, for keeping covenant with God’s people, for providing food for…
Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4
So then, What is a Covenant-Keeping God to Do? Elizabeth Achtemeier, in her Interpretation commentary on the book of Habakkuk insists that, while the backdrop of this prophetic book is the disobedience and injustice of God’s people and their subsequent punishment at the hands of an invading Babylonian army, that is not the primary focus…
Psalm 146
Psalm 146:9 directly names that famous triplet found throughout the Bible but most especially in the Old Testament: the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. If you read God’s Law and the various statutes God put into place for his people Israel (especially in Leviticus but elsewhere as well), you will see again and again…
Psalm 113
Many of us have been taught that sometimes it is helpful to read passages from the perspective of those who find themselves on the underside of history. This may be especially true of famous pieces of writing that we are perhaps too accustomed to reading from the vantage point of those who tend to come…
Jeremiah 18:1-11
Illustration: One of the most delightful challenges of pastoring is attempting answer kids’ questions about God. They are unfiltered and haven’t yet learned the church rules dictating what one can wonder, ask or assert about who God is and how God works in the world. (Maybe this is what Jesus intended when he wished that…
Psalm 103:1-8 2025
As lyric psalms go, it is tough to beat Psalm 103. The RCL is having us look at only the first eight of the psalm’s twenty-two verses but we know this poem stays on high notes of beauty and praise throughout. In a couple of the congregations to which I have belonged the pastors used…
Psalm 82
Some translations of Psalm 82, including the New International Version I typically look at, put scare quotes around the three instances of the word “gods” in this short psalm. Sometimes such scare quotes get called air quotes if invoked by a preacher or other public speaker. If you say, “Well, according to certain ‘experts’ ….
Psalm 33:12-22
When I was somewhere around the age of 9 years old and my brother was 5 years old, my Dad bought us a Shetland-Welsh Pony. We had moved out to the country the year before and so had our own barn and fenced-in pasture. I had said I was interested in having a horse or…
Psalm 138
The 138th psalm covers a lot of ground. It also reflects both high aspirations and hopes and also notes of utter realism from the hardscrabble reality of life in a broken world. On the one hand we encounter here the opening sentiments of full-throated, full-hearted praise of Israel’s wonderful and faithful and gracious God. God…
Psalm 66:1-9
To read Psalm 66 while bombs are dropping in Israel, Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, and maybe other places is an odd, disconcerting experience. “All the earth bows to you, they sing the praises of your name.” Really? “His eyes watch the nations, let not the rebellious rise up against him.” Is God just watching, just observing? …
Psalm 16
We have all seen the latter portion of Psalm 16 used at Christian funerals. It gets printed on the memorial folder or the funeral service bulletin. Or we preachers are asked to base our funeral sermon on Psalm 16, especially verses 9-11. And we have occasionally seen verse 9b engraved on headstones at the cemetery. …
Psalm 8
Some years back I was slated to preach a sermon from Hebrews 2 as part of the major annual Worship Symposium we have held for many years at Calvin University and Seminary. The portion of Hebrews 2 I preached on quotes Psalm 8 and applies some of the psalm’s language to Jesus. In particular it…
Psalm 104:24-34, 35b
Let’s stipulate that the primary aim of preaching is not to condemn people or hurl about accusations and judgments. The primary aim of preaching is to proclaim the Good News that just is the Gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord. Even so, skipping over Psalm 104:35a as the Lectionary apparently would have us essentially do…
Psalm 148
Psalm 148 gives us a lot of movement. The first four verses have us moving in a downward direction. We begin in the heights above, in the heavens. Then we move down a rung to see angels and heavenly hosts. Continuing the descent we arrive at the sun, moon, and stars. Finally we get to…
Psalm 30
A core tenet of the Christian faith is, to quote from the much-loved hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” “Thou changest not, thy compassions they fail not, as Thou hast been, Thou forever will be.” The more fancy theological term for this is the Doctrine of Divine Immutability. Or we sometimes say God is the same…
Psalm 150
Psalm 150 is the giant exclamation mark that closes out the Book of Psalms. In six swift and short verses the psalmist looks back on the previous 149 songs in the Hebrew Psalter and then as much as says, “Here’s what this whole book has been saying all along.” The psalms—each of them and all…
Psalm 114
Last week our Psalm commentary was on Psalm 118, one of the options for Palm/Passion Sunday. This week the Year C Easter Psalm is 118, the only option. So for this commentary we will take up Psalm 114, which is the Psalm assigned for Easter evening. Psalm 114 is in its own way a somewhat…
Psalm 19
Law. Decrees. Statues. Commands. Precepts. Once the writer of Psalm 19 switched his focus from the wonder of creation to the wonder of God’s law, he dug deep into his Hebrew thesaurus to use about every synonym for “law” as he could find. But he used this variety of terms not merely because he did…
Psalm 36:5-10
Psalm 36 contains a striking line about God: “In your light we see light.” It is a curious turn of phrase, seeming very nearly tautological. What does it mean that we can only see light when we are in the midst of some other light? It may be a way of saying that we cannot…
Psalm 29
This is the Sunday to observe things related to the Baptism of Jesus and each of the four assigned Year C readings tie in with baptism. The Acts 8 passage is a little bit of an outlier in that no water is involved but instead baptism is mentioned even as the Holy Spirit gets poured…
Psalm 147:12-20
It’s not at all clear why the Lectionary skips the first 11 verses of the 147th psalm since they contain much of the same sentiments and ideas as the final verses that the RCL does select. In any event, this is one of a number of psalms and other biblical passages where the psalmist takes…
Psalm 148
Whether it is Lectionary Year A, B, or C, if it’s the first Sunday after Christmas, you will see Psalm 148 as the psalm reading. Somebody along the way must have determined that this is such a fitting post-Christmas Day psalm that no Lectionary cycle would be complete without it. Many years that Sunday is…
Psalm 16
It is easy to see why many people associate Psalm 16 with funerals. It often gets read at funerals and one or another of the verses sometimes gets printed on the cover or the back cover of a funeral program or memorial folder. And of course sometimes we preachers are asked by families to use…
Psalm 146
Psalm 146 is the Year B psalm appointed for November 10, 2024, which in the United States will be the first Sunday following the Presidential election. No doubt even those of you reading this commentary who do not live in the U.S. have been aware of this election and maybe you have even paid some…
Psalm 91:9-16
If you have been reading my sermon commentaries here on the CEP website over the years, then you have no doubt sensed that I hold a very high view of Scripture as God’s Word. I take it more than seriously and I reverently honor its inspired nature and believe it is infallible in all the…
Psalm 8
Psalm 8 swiftly sums up something that the Israelites found as amazing as anything else they could think of. Yes, the psalm is about the majesty of God and that is awesome enough. And the psalmist sees that majesty of God chiefly in the things that this great God created and most especially the wonders…
James 1:17-27
Were you to ask North American citizens of the 21st century, “What is God like?” you might get, especially in some culturally diverse areas, as many as 15-20 answers. Some of them would reflect long-standing religious traditions. Others might reflect a kind of DIY theology. And some answers might reflect an atheism or agnosticism. Few…
Psalm 34:15-22
So here we are for the third week in a row in Psalm 34, this time centering on the concluding verses. In the first of this Lectionary triplet on this psalm we took note of the fact that this is one of those sunny-side-up poems in the Hebrew Psalter in which everything is coming up…
Psalm 34:1-8
Let’s say you are going through a tough season in your life. Too much has gone wrong of late and in your head you find yourself returning again and again to that line from the hymn “Abide with Me”: “Death and decay in all around I see.” And let’s say further that one of the…
Psalm 85:8-13
It could be pretty easy, one supposes, to glide over the concluding verses of Psalm 85 and not take much notice of what they are actually conveying. This is just how the psalms go, we might think. The kind of language being employed at the end is nothing terribly unusual. This is poetry and poetry…
Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32
Ancient Israel was never know to be a seafaring people. By Jesus’s day being a fisherman was clearly a common occupation on the Sea of Galilee but Israel did not have much experience with sailing forth on mighty sea vessels out into the Mediterranean or some such. Yet the section of Psalm 107 that the…
Psalm 81:1-10
Psalm 81 is God’s cri du coeur, the cry of the heart. When we think of God’s heart, we mostly think of its purity or power. There is a long tradition in what is now mainly the Roman Catholic tradition of the “sacred heart.” If you have ever been to Paris, you perhaps visited the…
John 3:1-17
We visited part of Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus back in Lent. But back then, we focused on verses 14-21 and we didn’t get Nicodemus’s great question for Trinity Sunday in verse 9: “How can these things be?” Of course, Nicodemus is asking about how it’s possible for humans to be born from above or again,…
Psalm 114
The Lectionary assigned parts of Psalm 118 for both Palm/Passion Sunday and Easter and since the March 24 sermon commentary here on the CEP website was on Psalm 118, I will direct you to look that up in our Sermon Commentary Library. But for this commentary we will take the psalm for Year B Easter…
Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
It may be somewhat understandable that the Lectionary would have us stop short of this psalm’s sudden shift in tone starting in verse 19. A poem that had been 100% a lyric reflection on the abiding presence of God somehow briefly morphs into a full-throated imprecation against the wicked. This seems to come up like…
Psalm 29
Last summer a tornado ripped through our area. It did not come very close to where I live but for those in and near its path, it was frightening. Whole homes were destroyed and in some places so many trees came down, you could not recognize whole neighborhoods. A man with whom I chatted this…
Psalm 148
No moment on the annual calendar gets more associated with popping champagne corks than New Year’s Eve. So it is appropriate that on this last Sunday and day of 2023 the Lectionary directs us to Psalm 148, which is in its own way a fizzing and frothing bottle of champagne in word form. It is…
Psalm 80:7-15
Carving out only the middle section of Psalm 80 (as the Lectionary does) has several drawbacks, not least that if you only read those 9 verses, you miss the framing refrain of this poem as it occurs word-for-word in verses 3, 7, and 19: Restore us, Lord God Almighty; make your face shine on us,…
Psalm 138
Years ago I read a wonderful novel by Indian writer Arundhati Roy and one of the things I liked about the book was its great title: The God of Small Things. That title can be an apt summary for something you run across often in the psalms, including in Psalm 138. Israel praised their God…
Psalm 67
When we think of getting a blessing, we tend to focus on ourselves as the recipient of something good—something that will be good for us, something that will benefit us. The classic Aaronic Benediction from Numbers 6—that is clearly echoed in Psalm 67:1—is a good example. When I give this benediction in church, I am…
Psalm 85:8-13
“Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other.” Here is a lyric and pretty well-known line from Psalm 85. But based on how this psalm begins—in the part the Lectionary would have us leap frog over in the first 7 verses—you would not have predicted this Hebrew poem would end up including…
Psalm 145:8-9, 14-21
The RCL had us in the heart of Psalm 145 a scant month ago for its July 9, 2023, psalm lection. Why we are looping back to some of these same verses so soon is not clear. In any event, I refer you to that sermon commentary and will not here repeat everything I said…
Genesis 21:8-21
Whatever else a person may think about the Bible and about the Old Testament in particular, you have to say this: it’s honest. The text does not generally shy away from presenting less-than-savory facts about even some of the most important characters in the biblical story. It’s often the proverbial “warts and all” presentation. The…
Psalm 100
It will never happen of course but sometimes one could wish that for certain absolutely key vocabulary words in Hebrew or Greek, all Bible translations in English (or in any language) could agree on one translation of that word that would get used consistently every time it occurs. That way readers of the translation would…
John 14:15-21
Separating this part of Jesus’s conversation with the disciples from last week’s helps us focus on the bonded (in the sense of stuck to/with) nature of God-with-us, no matter which particular person of the Trinity it is who is with us. The ties that bind us, of course, is the love of God. If we…
John 14:1-14
Comments, Questions, and Observations “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” These words can apply to so many different situations, but in this particular text, they immediately follow Jesus’s prophetic promise that he is about to be betrayed by one them, will be leaving them, and will be denied by one of the most loyal…
Isaiah 42:1-9
Throughout the “Servant Songs” in this part of Isaiah, despite the focus on the Servant, there is no question who is really in charge and calling all the shots. The Servant has work to do and will achieve that work to a stunning degree of effectiveness. Nothing short of the bringing of justice to all…
Psalm 121
When I was a little kid, I remember Psalm 121 being read in church or sometimes at our dinner table. Back then various versions of the Bible translated that first line, “I lift up mine eyes to the hills, whence cometh my help.” The sentence is in the indicative mood. Read this way, it is…
Jeremiah 31:27-34
I am not sure why the Revised Common Lectionary’s series of passages from Jeremiah skips around the way it does (one week Jeremiah 32 but then next time around it’s back to chapter 29 and now we leap to chapter 31) but I think I can understand why the Lectionary saved this passage from the…
Psalm 146
In contemporary music there are few crescendos quite as dramatic and raucous as the one that concludes the Beatles song “A Day in the Life.” A somewhat wild cacophony of strings, brass, and percussion all come together to end this remarkable song with a bang followed by a very long sustain on a piano that…
Jeremiah 2:4-13
According to the old adage, “You are what you eat.” But parts of the Bible, including Jeremiah 2, give voice to a different point of view: You are what you worship. In Jeremiah 2, one of the prophet’s initial broadsides against the people of Israel was the sad fact that in worshiping gods that were…
Psalm 66:1-9
A bit cheeky. A goodly dose of chutzpah. A tad forward. You have to admire the psalmists who on many occasions are not the least bit adverse to ordering the whole world to praise the God of Israel. Make no mistake: all those “Praise the Lord” lines in so many of the psalms are in…
Psalm 16
Psalm 16 presents the words of a person whose life appears to be going swimmingly. Everything is working for this poet. These look to be the words of a winner, of a person who was born sunny-side up as a confirmed optimist. And I suspect we’ve all met people like this. I also suspect that…
Psalm 8
The poet of Psalm 8 stared into the night sky and was properly dazzled at what he saw. But to put it mildly, what he did not see was a lot! Had this psalmist been able to spend a scant ten minutes looking through a telescope, he would doubtless have fainted in wonderment. Ancient astronomers…
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Are the Lectionary folks winking at us a bit with this text selection for Trinity Sunday? Obviously you don’t get any robust Trinitarian texts anywhere in the Old Testament. If it is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit you are looking for—or any combo of a couple of those at least—then Proverbs or Psalms or anywhere…
Psalm 32
Most of his friends had been hanged. But despite his central role in helping to construct Adolf Hitler’s Nazi nightmare, Albert Speer somehow managed to receive from the Nuremberg trials only a twenty-year sentence at the Spandau Prison in Berlin. Not long after arriving in Spandau, Speer met with the prison chaplain. To the chaplain’s…
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
It is an unhappy fact that with very little effort, we could update the language of Psalm 91 to fit our present age (and although the RCL only takes the first and last few verses, this Sermon Commentary will encompass the whole psalm). Talk of a “fowler’s snare” sounds suspiciously like the kind of traps…
Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13)
It was the year King Uzziah died. Or, it was the year President Kennedy died. Or it was the year 9/11 rattled the world to its core. Or it was the year the COVID pandemic began. It was the year when things fell apart, when foundations were shaken, when the markets crumbled, when all that…
Psalm 29
Psalm 29 is a favorite of the Revised Common Lectionary. Indeed, if you search the Sermon Commentary Library here on CEP, you will find not fewer than ten such commentaries from recent years. Psalm 29 comes up most every year on the Baptism of our Lord Sunday after Epiphany and it pops up here and…
Psalm 93
As I have noted before here on CEP, at Calvin Seminary we use Paul Scott Wilson’s “Four Pages of the Sermon” method as the grammar and structure of sermons. A key part of that is locating what Wilson calls “Trouble in the Text.” What is the tension, the crisis, the question, the issue at hand…
Ruth 1:1-18
To my mind stopping the reading of Ruth 1 at verse 18 is the narrative equivalent of ending the movie Field of Dreams just before the moment when Ray encounters his long-dead and estranged father on his magical Iowa baseball diamond. Why stop short of the scene that brings the whole thing together!? So trust…
Exodus 14:19-31
“Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last!” Well, not so fast, children of Israel. You have walked away from your enslavement in Egypt, but your former Master is chasing you down. Once Pharaoh awakened from the midnight horror of losing his oldest son and looked at his situation in…
Psalm 66:1-9
A bit cheeky. A goodly dose of chutzpah. A tad forward. You have to admire the psalmists who on many occasions are not the least bit adverse to ordering the whole world to praise the God of Israel. Make no mistake: all those “Praise the Lord” lines in so many of the psalms are in…
Psalm 16
Psalm 16 presents the words of a person whose life appears to be going swimmingly. Everything is working for this poet. These look to be the words of a winner, of a person who was born sunny-side up as a confirmed optimist. And I suspect we’ve all met people like this. I also suspect that…
Psalm 8
The poet of Psalm 8 stared into the night sky and was properly dazzled at what he saw. But to put it mildly, what he did not see was a lot! Had this psalmist been able to spend a scant ten minutes looking through a telescope, he would doubtless have fainted in wonderment. Ancient astronomers…
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
It is an unhappy fact that with very little effort, we could update the language of Psalm 91 to fit our present age (and although the RCL only takes the first and last few verses, this Sermon Commentary will encompass the whole psalm). Talk of a “fowler’s snare” sounds suspiciously like the kind of traps…
1 Samuel 3:1-10, (11-20)
Nothing quite grabs our attention like a voice in the night. After all, it almost always signals trouble. The voice may be that of a child from the next bedroom: “Grandma, I’m sick,” or a teenager’s cell phone: “Dad, I’ve run out of gas.” Sometimes, of course, the voice in the middle of the night…
Psalm 29
The Revised Common Lectionary chooses this Psalm for this first Sunday after the Epiphany of Christ in all three years of its reading cycle. Clearly the Lectionary sees Psalm 29 as a parallel to the baptism of Jesus, because in both the voice of God rings out over the waters. Psalm 29 shows us an…
Hosea 11:1-11
Few issues seem to more deeply divide North American Christians than the final fate of God’s Jewish people. Will God save them en masse so that all Jews get to experience the peace of God’s new creation? Will the Holy Spirit convert some Jews to the Christian faith before Christ returns? Will God finally grant…
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
Psalm 91 has what Karl Jacobson calls a “checkered” history. On the one hand, it has been a source of inspiration and comfort to millions of Christians. The great theologian Athanasius said to Marcellinus, “If you desire to stablish yourself and others in devotion, to know what confidence is to be reposed in God, and…
Matthew 13:10-17
Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider Thus far in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus has been busy. He’s been teaching and preaching, he’s been healing, he’s been explaining, he’s been gathering disciples, and he’s been traveling. And, here in chapter 13 he does something new. He tells his audience a story – a parable –…
2 Corinthians 7
Comments and Observations Recently my congregation lifted up their voices and sang “Blessed Be Your Name” (Matt and Beth Redman). The song speaks of the ups and downs in life – we sang of the times when we’re “in the land that is plentiful, where your streams of abundance flow” we sang of the times…
2 Samuel 5:1-10
Some years ago the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible was published, illustrated by the well-known artist, Barry Moser. I had the privilege of hearing Moser talk about his work some while back and since I am not the most astute observer of art, listening to the artist describe what he did in his various black-and-white drawings opened…
Preaching Connection: God