Daniel Rose: The Pastor Next Door

To listen to the unabridged message click here: Even Them

God’s grace flows from God’s identity

We have come to the end of another book of the Bible together. We did John, and now here we are at the end of Jonah.

Jonah chapter 4 is fascinating to me because it is unresolved. You get to the end and you think to yourself, “Where is the rest? Did somebody lose a page?” Let me assure you: that really is the end. It is not a misprint. Nobody tore the page out of your Bible. It just ends abruptly and leaves you wanting more.

It reminds me of the end of The Sopranos, which ends the same way, and people have debated for twenty years about how it really ended.

To listen to the whole unabridged class: The Beautiful Folly

Loved as we are, not as we should be

Beyond Sunday School: The Ragamuffin Gospel, chapter 11 and A Word After

We have come to the end of The Ragamuffin Gospel, and chapter 11, “A Touch of Folly,” is the right ending. Because after ten chapters, Brennan Manning wants us to admit what normal people have always known about grace.

It is ridiculous.

To listen to the unabridged message click here: The Second Call

God brings mercy even through reluctant messengers

When we begin our faith journeys, it often feels easy. It is as if the world goes from black and white to color. We have this overwhelming sense of God’s goodness and grace, and when we are young in the faith, we can be almost radical about it. “I will do anything for Jesus, the one who saved me. I will go to the ends of the earth.” We are motivated by stories of missionaries, we read through the book of Acts, and we think, “I am going to be a radical. It is going to be great.”

Then we start living our lives. We try to follow Jesus through ordinary days, and life becomes very real. So many of the things we expected to happen do not happen. The simple answers we started with bump up against real life and begin to crash around us. We can end up in a place where we no longer know what to do, where we cannot quite get our hands around our faith anymore.

To listen to the whole unabridged class: Limping into the Second Call

The afternoon of life, the banquet invitation, and the welcome home sign

Beyond Sunday School: The Ragamuffin Gospel, chapters 9 and 10

I am the baby in our Beyond Sunday School room. I am 50.

Which is exactly why chapter 9 of The Ragamuffin Gospel, “The Second Call,” landed the way it did around our table. We are all pretty squarely in the second calling season of life. And Manning’s great gift in this chapter is the way he talks about it.

Most of us begin with what theologians call an early naivety. A simple belief. God said it, I believe it, that settles it. And that works, for a while.

Then this thing called life happens.

To listen to unabridged message click here: Grace at the Bottom

God’s covenantal love is ever present even in our self-made pits

There was a great theologian by the name of Karl Barth.

He wrote this huge theological treatise called Church Dogmatics. I do not know how many volumes it is, but it is a lot of pages. Barth was a heavyweight in theological circles. He trained a number of theologians coming out of the twentieth century, and he is kind of a big deal in Reformed circles.

You would think a man like that would have quite the answer to this question: “Dr. Barth, when were you saved?”

To listen to unabridged message click here: With or Without Us

God will bring peace whether we choose to join him or not

We are beginning a new series, and we’re going to spend the next four weeks looking at the little book of the prophet Jonah.

Now, you’ve probably heard sermons on Jonah before. In our family, the story of Jonah was the foundation of my son Ethan’s VeggieTales trauma.

Counterfeit grace, fear, and learning to stop pretending

To listen to the whole unabridged class: Paste Jewelry and a New Law

Beyond Sunday School: The Ragamuffin Gospel, chapters 7 and 8

Chapter 7 of The Ragamuffin Gospel gave me a picture of cheap grace I had not quite considered before.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave us the phrase “cheap grace.” Brennan Manning gives us paste jewelry and sawdust hot dogs. It is grace that looks like the real thing from a distance. It is faith we can put on for public display. It fills a plate, but it does not nourish anybody.

At the center of the chapter is a sentence that fairly punched me in the face. Manning has just quoted a long passage from the letter of James when he writes:

Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Eyes Forward

Don’t look back in shame, don’t look sideways in comparison — look forward into eternity as we follow Christ

We have made it. We are here at the end of John chapter twenty-one — our nineteenth week in the Gospel of John. We’re going to put the final touches on this Gospel.

And the nice thing about a last sermon is that we just get to touch on some really simple, easy things brought to the fore here in these last few verses of John. We’re just going to deal with shame, comparison, and eternity. No big deal. Just small little things.

To listen to the whole unabridged class: Wonder and Gratitude

Beyond Sunday School — The Ragamuffin Gospel, chapters 5 and 6

When was the last time something ordinary stopped you right in your tracks?

Not a polite “oh, that’s kind of cool,” but a real wow. You just had to stand there and take it in.