Find yourself in a better story
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No Matthew post this week because …
… I unexpectedly spent the weekend in the hospital, and my assistant (who is also my cousin/best friend/house mate), who usually puts the posts up for me, pretty much spent every minute of the weekend there with me. She took that picture ^^. And also braided my hair so it wouldn’t get in my face…
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Higher Vision: Why Jesus’s Morality Is Better Than Ours
“Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual,” Friedrich Nietzche wrote. Einstein said, “A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs.” Morality, in other words, is determined by our surroundings: by the needs, expectations, and ties of the people around us. MORALITY IS … Nietzche and Einstein got…
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Worlds to Wander: Anne Elisabeth Stengl, Rachel Starr Thomson, and Fantasy Escapes that Inspire
C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, J.R.R Tolkien … their names are legendary because they didn’t just give us stories that inspired us, they gave us worlds to wander. Those worlds still call to many of us. They haunt our dreams. They inform our thinking. And they still inspire us, somehow, to live more fully and seek…
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Good-bye, Frustration: How the Spirit Sets Us Free
Jesus came to change our lives in an actual, practical, daily sense. This doesn’t happen without our participation. But it doesn’t happen by our own power, either. The story so far is this: Jesus came to give us a kingdom. He didn’t come to destroy the law of Moses, but to accomplish what it couldn’t.…
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The Law of the Spirit and How You Can Learn to Live Like God
What does the law of God have to do with being a Christian? This might be one of the biggest points of confusion in Christendom today. Do we need rules? If not, why did Jesus give us rules? Was it just to teach us that we can’t keep rules? Will the law free us? Judge…
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God Is Not a Legalist (And Righteousness Isn’t What You Thought It Was) – Part 2
Righteousness is not what you think it is. When it comes to righteousness, most of us think like Pharisees. We see it as a position we must earn or else a quality we must create within ourselves through our actions. We’re wrong on both counts. (Explore this further in Part 1 of this discussion here.)…
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God Is Not a Legalist (And Righteousness Isn’t What You Thought It Was) – Part 1
We don’t say it, but most of us understand the Sermon on the Mount as one giant losing proposition. We cannot possibly be as righteous as it calls us to be. It’s the law squared and compounded. But that understanding only proves we’re reading it with the eyes of a Pharisee. This week, forget…
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Not to Destroy But to Fulfill: How Jesus Gets the Job Done
The Sermon on the Mount begins with a charter: the eight blessings of the kingdom. That’s followed by a purpose statement: that we might be salt and light. Next comes Jesus’s discourse on the law. He says: Don’t assume that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy…
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Christians, You Weren’t Saved Just for Your Own Sake
In the progression of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus begins with the offer of the kingdom. The kingdom is a gift of grace, given to the empty-handed, the poor in spirit. It is a blessing, a gift empowered with the quality of fruitfulness and the capacity to bring forth life. This gift is transformational,…
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Christians, Our Culture Needs You (And It’s Not for the Reason You Think)
It’s one of my pet peeves, and I hear Christians say it all the time, usually with an air of superiority. “We shouldn’t be surprised things are getting so bad. The only thing that’s going to fix it is Jesus coming back.” We say it about politics. About cultural trends. About R-rated movies. About…