Find yourself in a better story
-
A Foolproof Guide to How Every Christian Ought to Think About Wealth
A Guest Post by Roy Goble Did I grab your attention with that title? Great. Now I can be honest and tell you that it’s utter nonsense. When it comes to wealth and following Jesus, there are no easy answers. No one-size-fits-all solutions. But that doesn’t stop certain people from trumpeting supposed answers anyway. Your…
-
A Brief Hiatus
Those of you who check will have noticed there was no new Matthew blog today … or last week … sorry about that. Both weeks, a heavy schedule beat out my best intentions to get posts written. This is likely to happen for several more weeks as well. So I’ve decided to declare a brief…
-
The Way of Reconciliation: How Mercy Triumphs Over Judgment
Jesus is relentless in his examination of anger: its roots, its ugliness, the damage it does, and the guilt we incur because of it. Along the way he continually underlines the fact of judgment. We might be tempted to see “the judgment of God” as something arbitrary or cruel, but the truth is that because…
-
Rooted in the Word
Taking a small break from the Matthew series today to post a message I shared at my church two weeks ago. Possibly THE most important thing we can do as disciples of Jesus is learn to root ourselves in the Word through study and meditation. In this message, I talk about meditation and practical ways…
-
Raca, Respect, and the Agape Love of God, Part 3
Jesus says those who treat others with contempt are subject to hellfire. It’s easy to think we know exactly what that means, but we may miss a lot if we just skim over this. Let’s take a closer look. When Jesus talks about anger, he takes it in levels, and he gives levels of judgment…
-
Raca, Respect, and the Agape Love of God – Part 2
This should not be shocking to any Christian, but to me it was when I discovered it: God respects, values, and esteems people. All people, simply because they are human beings, created in his image and created with worth. For the last several weeks we’ve been exploring Jesus’s moral teaching on anger, which he equates…
-
Raca, Respect, and the Agape Love of God – Part 1
Anger is not a victimless crime. Anger is aggressive. To have someone’s anger turned on you—especially when it’s “without cause,” not your fault or out of proportion to your fault—is emotionally and physically traumatizing. At first glance, Jesus’s moral teachings in Matthew 5 can look almost trite or arbitrary. Given a chance to address…
-
Why Sin Is Serious
Most of us can justify anger pretty easily. It’s bad, but not that bad. Anger isn’t murder. Except that it is. In Jesus’s first moral teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes the outrageous equivocation of anger with murder. You have heard that it was said to our ancestors, Do not murder, and…
-
Exploring the Gospel of Matthew: Index of Posts
This series is an ongoing journey through the gospel of Matthew, the kingdom gospel. Whenever possible, I post a new article every three weeks. When I began this work, I had no idea how much it would grow. Thank you for coming along with me. Part 1: Anointed One: Is This the Jesus YOU Know?…
-
What’s So Bad About Anger and How Jesus Calls Us to Freedom
According to Jesus, people don’t make you angry. You do. And if you want to be free, you have to take responsibility for it. Last post, I talked about the three principles of morality as Jesus teaches it: it’s transcendent and therefore absolute; it’s internal; and it’s individual. As such, it’s demanding. Jesus doesn’t pull…