On Pentecost, the first day of the Christian church, when Saint Peter was preaching the very first Christian sermon, after he got through the introduction, the main text he preached on was Psalm 16. His message was that Jesus Christ is risen. If Psalm 16…
Read More
Psalm 110 is unbelievably rich, but it’s not all that well known. Did you know that the New Testament writers quote this psalm more than any other passage in the Old Testament? Jesus forcefully used this psalm to explain to people who he was. Furthermore…
Read More
We’re going to look at one of the key conundrums in the Bible. And if we understand it, we’re going to be able to understand a lot of the Bible. It’s also a conundrum in human thought, and it’s part of the human condition. You see it in this passage, whe…
Read More
No matter how savvy you are, no matter how much planning you do, no matter how powerful or successful you are, there’s no way to stop times of difficulty from coming into your life. They will come into your life.
So how do you get peace and poise in your…
Psalms 42 and 43 talk about how to deal with being downcast, how to deal with being despondent, in despair, in darkness. Everybody needs this throughout life. No matter who we are, we all go through these times.
Let’s notice that there’s a condition des…
The way the word “sin” hits modern people’s ears, it either makes us laugh or shudder. We laugh, because, generally speaking, the word sin is usually used in modern public discourse in a lighthearted, ironic way. But we don’t like to talk about sin serio…
Read More
What we try to do during the Easter season is turn our minds toward what Jesus did, why he did it, and the meaning of what he did in Gethsemane, on the hill of Calvary, in the tomb. One of the things, among many, that it means is what we see here in Psal…
Read More
The gospel is only an implicit, untapped power in your life until it’s released in power through repentance. For the changes you want, the changes you seek, the changes you need–the secret is repentance.
This passage is perhaps the classic and the greate…
The Bible says human hearts are sinful, but beyond that we’re slaves to sin. The Bible says sin is not just an action; it’s a power. Every sinful action has a destructive power upon the faculty that put that action forth.
In other words, when you sin wit…
In the narrative we’re looking at, Naaman continually seeks to go to kings, but God insists on continually speaking to Naaman only and exclusively through slaves. Naaman is continually going to “somebodies,” and God insists on speaking to him through “no…
Read More