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.

Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Breakfast on the Beach

Ordinary guys, ordinary work, and the extraordinary holiness of abiding in Christ

We are coming to the end now in our study of the Gospel of John. This is our penultimate message in the series. I just like saying penultimate. I think that’s a cool word.

So we’ve got this week and next, and then we will somehow have finished this entire Gospel in about nineteen weeks. Not too shabby, I suppose. And you have persevered well through it.

We pick it up in chapter 21, the last chapter — and scholars wrestle with it, because John’s Gospel really seems like it should have ended at chapter 20: “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” Done. Finished. Great job, John.

LIsten to the unabridged audio here: Tilted Halos

What happens when we stop keeping our halos on too tight

Beyond Sunday School — The Ragamuffin Gospel, chapters 3 and 4

I still crack up at where Brennan Manning says the phrase “ragamuffin gospel” came from.

He overheard some valley girls talking, and one of them said something like, “Like, Jesus is totally intense — dying for ragamuffins and all.”

I can hear it in my head. Maybe I have watched Legally Blonde too many times, but I can hear it.

And yet, for all the comedy in that, Manning is getting at something deadly serious. We are rooted — absolutely rooted — in the necessity of grace.

How we miss the presence of Christ in our grief — and how He meets us there anyway

Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Believing is Seeing

Happy Easter.

Yes, I know it’s October. But here we are, in John chapter 20, on Easter morning — which is as good a reminder as any that you don’t need the church calendar to tell you to celebrate the risen Christ. Really, we should probably reorient ourselves to think of every Sunday as Easter Sunday. As Resurrection Sunday.

LIsten to the unabridged audio here: Grace, Drunk Straight

This week in Beyond Sunday School we dove into the first two chapters of Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel: chapter one, “Something Is Radically Wrong,” and chapter two, “The Magnificent Monotony.” I have to say, I deeply appreciate a preacher who can nail the alliteration. Magnificent monotony. That’s good work.

I opened the session with a question, and I’ll ask it of you too: When you hear the word grace, what do you know is true — and what is still hard to trust?

The room answered fast. It’s free. You don’t have to do anything to gain it. And that, frankly, is the part that’s hardest to accept. Someone else added: grace is for everybody. Which drew an honest nod, because if we’re telling the truth, most of us would prefer it weren’t.