Ministry > Our Daily Bread
The Only King
As five-year-old Eldon listened to the pastor talk about Jesus leaving His heavenly kingdom and coming to earth, he gasped when the pastor thanked Him in prayer for dying for our sins. “Oh, no! He died?” the boy said in surprise.
From the start of Jesus’s life on earth, there were people who wanted Him dead. Wise men came to Jerusalem during the reign of King Herod inquiring, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him” (Matthew 2:2). When the king heard this, he…
Here Be Dragons?
Legend has it that at the edges of medieval maps, marking the boundaries of the world the maps’ creators knew at the time, there’d be inscribed the words “Here be dragons”—often alongside vivid illustrations of the terrifying beasts supposedly lurking there.
There’s not much evidence medieval cartographers actually wrote these words, but I like to think they could have. Maybe because “here be dragons” sounds like something I might’ve written at the time—a grim warning that even if I didn’t know exactly what would happen if I ventured into the great unknown, it likely wouldn’t be good!
But there’s one glaring problem…
Conclusion
First Peter 1:3–5 describes a treasure trove of God’s abundant grace and mercy to believers through our participation in Christ: not only a dramatic rebirth from spiritual death to life, but an inheritance we can enjoy eternally with him.
How do we respond to such grace? The most appropriate response is…
Guarded by God
I wonder if part of why we forget to focus on our eternal inheritance is our own doubt and anxiety, our struggle to truly believe it’s real—for us at least.
When I send a gift to someone in the mail, I sometimes get anxious about whether it will arrive safely, especially if it’s a precious gift. What if it gets…
An Unfading Inheritance
When I turned thirty-five my mother gave me a treasured family heirloom: a gold diamond ring that had belonged to my great-great-grandfather. From the Greek island where he was born, my ancestor had brought it to Australia where I was born decades later. It means a lot to me to wear his ring, a ring that’s now been handed down…
Living Hope through Resurrection
But new birth is just one of three ideas about salvation intricately interconnected in 1 Peter 1:3. The second key concept is that this spiritual rebirth is “into a living hope.”
Again, what does this mean? Hope might seem incredibly abstract; we understand being born into the world, or in a certain city, or into a family. But into hope?
New Birth
In the 1976 presidential race, Jimmy Carter described himself as a born-again Christian. At the time, this was not yet a widely known term, but it resonated with believers everywhere. President Carter was saying that he wasn’t just a “cultural Christian.” He didn’t merely belong to a denomination. Rather, he was claiming to be truly committed to Christ, the sort…
The Leaning Tower
You’ve probably heard of the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy, but have you heard of the leaning tower of San Francisco? It’s called the Millennium Tower. Built in 2008, this 58-story skyscraper stands proudly—but slightly crookedly—in downtown San Francisco.
The problem? Its engineers didn’t dig a deep enough foundation. So now they’re being forced to retrofit the foundation with repairs that may cost more than the entire tower did when it was originally built—a fix that some believe is necessary to keep it from collapsing during an earthquake.
The painful lesson here? Foundations matter. When your foundation isn’t solid, catastrophe…
Thinking about Resurrection
When asked, Christians are pretty good at offering explanations of what the death of Jesus means. They might reply that Jesus died for our sins. That he died as a sacrifice. That he died in our place. Believers may know sophisticated theological terms that further explain the meaning of Jesus’s death—words like atonement, substitution, reconciliation, and justification. Sure, not all…
The Transforming Power of the Gospel
If we truly wish to follow Christ, each day we need to fight our impatient, self-gratifying tendencies. And as Peter explains, it’s more than worth it. Let’s explore how Peter describes the incredible inheritance God has given us through Jesus’s resurrection. We’ll consider how Jesus gives believers not only a living hope but also an incredible, life-changing inheritance that will last forever. Most importantly, we’ll consider how this inheritance could change everything about how we live our lives.
A Hundred Years from Now
“I just want people to remember me a hundred years from now,” said screenwriter Rod Serling in 1975. Creator of the TV series The Twilight Zone, Serling wanted people to say of him, “He was a writer.” Most of us can identify with Serling’s desire to leave a legacy—something to give our lives a sense of meaning and permanence.
The story of Job shows us a man struggling with meaning amid life’s impermanence. In a moment, not just his possessions but those most precious to him, his children, were taken. Then his friends accused him of deserving this fate. Job cried out:…
The Centurion At The Cross
Now from the sixth hour darkness fell upon all the land until the ninth hour.
About the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “ELI, ELI, LAMA SABACHTHANI?” that is, “MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?”...
And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit.
And behold, the veil…
Centurions in the New Testament
Several centurions are mentioned in the New Testament. The accounts of the more prominent ones reveal the degree to which Christ’s message and influence were crossing social, ethnic, and political lines and barriers.
The Centurion of Capernaum (Matt. 8:5-13)
Now when Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to Him, pleading…
A Centurion’s Life
Our oldest son has been in the Army for several years. Watching him progress through the ranks from recruit to staff sergeant has been an education in what military life is like. Soldiers are committed to putting the mission before comfort, their comrades before self, and obedience to duty above their personal opinions about the orders they are given. It…
The Power Of The Cross
When I wrote the book Windows on Easter, from which this booklet is adapted, my goal was to take a fresh look at the familiar events of the death and resurrection of Christ by seeing them through the eyes of some of the men and women who were there. Those moments that opened eternity for the undeserving at the cost…
