Jesus did not arrive safely, comfortably, or legally secure. He fled by night, crossed borders, and lived in fear of returning home—because a politician wanted him dead. The Gospel doesn’t leave us room to sanitize this reality. If how we treat refugees is how we treat Jesus, then the question isn’t whether Christ was a…
“…all good allegory exists not to hide, but to reveal; to make the inner world more palpable by giving it an (imagined) concrete embodiment.” -C.S. Lewis A beam of light pierced through a small hole in the tent onto the farmer’s tired face and warmed his cheek. It was one of those beams you almost thought…
I was taught by the church that removing demons is easy. If you find one, you just tell it to go. I was told by trained exorcists that it was a little more complicated than that. If you find one, you must counsel the person to get it out. But then I found one, and…
There is laughter all over Isaac’s story. It starts with Abraham laughing at the idea that he and Sarah might have a kid after he had hit triple digits. Sarah laughed too, getting an extra kick out of the thought that she might experience sexual pleasure at her age—though when God called her out for…
I’m a third generation Free Methodist pastor and I sometimes wonder where I’d be today if my grandpa hadn’t started that tradition long ago. Likewise, I wonder if the tradition might continue with my own kids. My son already has plans to be a pastor and video game developer when he grows up, and my…
Through Abraham’s genetic line, we hoped for the sinless human descendant that would crush Satan’s head. But Abraham’s miraculous baby son, Isaac, was not the one. Indeed, we know very little about him at all, except that he needed a miracle child of his own to keep the line going. God healed his family of…
It’s hard to narrow the word glory down because it has a lot of meanings in the Bible. In this message, I work off Matthew Bates’ book, Why the Gospel?, to describe God’s glory in a way that implies fame. From this point of view, you actually have the ability to increase God’s glory.
In most Bible translations, there’s a story that goes like this: Abraham’s son, Isaac, went out in a field to meditate one evening. He then looked up and saw a woman named Rebekah approaching on a camel. She saw him and dismounted her camel and they were married shortly later. But there’s another way to…
Abraham and Sarah had gotten a good laugh from God’s promise that they would have a child, and they instead worked out their own way to secure a descendant. First, they planned on handing the family legacy down to Abraham’s chief servant, Eliezer. But then they decided to resort to a form of sex slavery…
We’ve all had that moment where we can’t find the remote, and then we discover it on the coffee table in front of us, where it had been sitting all along. How on earth did we miss it? It wasn’t even hidden! Perhaps that’s how Hagar felt when she saw a well right in front…
The literal translation of the word angel is messenger. These divine postmen not only pass along messages from God, but they return to Heaven with messages for God. As a part of God’s divine council, they weigh in on issues they’ve witnessed and offer input when God desires it. For example, God sent some angels…
Jamin Bradley 