Like all Americans, I grew up looking at a flag with my hand over my heart as I pledged my life to it at schools, sports, and even church. It had the word “God” in it, so I figured I was on the right track, but as I grew up, I started to note too…
We often remember scribes as the people who copied manuscripts in the ancient world, but they actually did a lot more than that. Indeed, a big part of the reason they were chosen to copy manuscripts is because of everything else they were trained to do. It was their job to teach and interpret important…
Christians are often found saying things like, “All of you God and none of me.” While the sentiment of such a statement can be appreciated, it’s not exactly a Biblical perspective of who we are as humans. God is not looking for Christians to become a homogenous group of people that are unidentifiable from each…
Of all the names God could have given Moses for himself, he chose YHWH, which scholars often refer to as the tetragrammaton. While this sounds like a name for a Transformer, it comes from the Greek tetra (four) and grammaton (letter). In Hebrew these four letters are often translated as, “I Am Who I Am.”…
Christians are weird about politics. If they’re in favor of a president, they’re quick to use the Scriptures to tell us that God puts all authorities in charge and that we are to follow and respect them. This simple-minded, blanket-statement theology immediately falls flat once someone like Hitler is in office, but we’re willing to…
Everything Everywhere All At Once has set a new high for absurdity in movies, but its writers manage to use this storytelling technique to say a lot about the world and our place in it. Pastors Dallas Flippin and Jamin Bradley dive into the spiritual and biblical themes that this movie holds just in time…
Chances are that you’ve probably met someone who’s been dead before, because in modern society death is temporary before it’s permanent. There’s always that narrow window in which someone can be revived and have their blood start flowing again. For this reason, death is scary, but not as scary as it used to be. Hope…
Remember back when the word “literally” meant literally? We used to use the word as a way of explaining the exact way in which something happened, but now dictionaries have changed the meaning because we all use it to embellish things that never really happened. That’s a pretty drastic change of definition, but culture has…
A friend recently wrote me the most encouraging note of my life. In it he mentioned, “You have the same spirit as John of Patmos. He possessed a wild imagination full of angelic beasts and fantastical dangers (sound familiar?). He was a poet and a lyricist and a storyteller (again…sound familiar?). He wove the scriptures…
This year we are praying that we raise up 26 new partners, 1 new deacon (which we’ve already started developing!), and 1 new local ministerial candidate for pastoring. Jamin explains some of the spiritual, biblical, and practical reasons behind these needs at 1208.
When I read Revelation in high school, I was super confused by the seven spirits before God’s throne. God was already three-in-one as the Trinity, but now his Holy Spirit was divided into seven parts? Many scholars have tried to explain how such a thing could work. But the seven spirits being the Holy Spirit…
Jamin Bradley 