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“The messengers must model the message.” N.T. Wright, Simply Christian

In the Beatitudes Christ says the merciful are blessed. Why? Because, He says, they will receive mercy. So, is Jesus suggesting a simple formula for improving the treatment you receive from others? I think not. Perhaps it’s helpful to first understand the point of the Beatitudes and what being merciful is all about. It is…

A pastor greets a new family to his church and spends the next fifteen minutes extolling the virtues of the congregation and its talented members.  He walks away hardly knowing anything about this new family, not to mention the basics of manners. A missionary team visits a third-world country with the goal of helping “those…

“…the living God fills heaven and earth, and yet he chooses to dwell particularly in one place. And that place is no longer a building, in Jerusalem or anywhere else. It is a family, the family of those who belong to the Messiah.” N.T. Wright, After You Believe “So then you are no longer strangers…

Lately we’ve been thinking about how to be our brother’s keeper in the best sense of that phrase. Living closely together makes any superficial ideas about our responsibility toward each other seem ridiculous. We know the answers are much deeper and more costly than you might typically hear. We were intrigued by Carolyn Arend’s song,…

I think we often have false concepts about growth and maturity. We think that growth will mean that we’ll be less emotionally upset by negative situations. The farther along the Christian path we are, the less negative emotional energy we’ll experience. We envision maturity to be a state of emotional calm and peace that can’t…

In N.T. Wright’s new book, After You Believe, he brings out a powerful thought about the metaphor Paul uses for the church – the human body. In 1 Cor. 12 Paul uses the human body to describe the church, “For even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members…

“Since ‘love’ is the primary virtue (Col. 3:14), community is the primary context.” N.T. Wright, After You Believe

“That which is going to be true in the future…must be anticipated in the present.” N.T. Wright, After You Believe

“…people tend to go in one of two directions when they think of how to behave. You can live by rules, by a sense of duty, by an obligation imposed on you whether you feel like doing it or not. Or you can declare that you are free from all that sort of thing and…