This season The Pastor Next Door I am exploring de- and re-construction.
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This quote from James Clear’s newsletter today resonated:
“The measure of a life is not what you consume, but what you contribute.
Spend less time owning, consuming, taking. Spend more time giving, creating, making.”
This quote from St Bernard of Clairvaux really resonated with me. Perhaps it will resonate with you too.
“Blessed," he says, "are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God" (Mt 5:9). Consider carefully that it is not the people who call for peace but those who make peace who are commended. For there are those who talk but do nothing (Mt 23:3). For just as it is not the hearers of the law but the doers who are righteous (Rom 2:13), so it is not those who preach peace but the authors of peace who are blessed.”
- St. Bernard of Clairvaux, abbot/ theologian
Leg day is diabolical. I can barely traverse the stairs in my home. 😂
2.1 Deconstruction is Not the Enemy
Navigating Faith: Deconstruction and Reconstruction
Exploring the complexities of faith in our modern world.
Welcome back to another season of honest conversations on the Pastor Next Door podcast. This time, we dive deep into the concepts of deconstruction and reconstruction of faith, a journey many find themselves on when faced with challenging beliefs.
Jesus washed Judas’s feet.
Knowing what was coming.
That’s the whole point of Christian love — it doesn’t wait to be earned.
New post: “The Way Down” (John 13)
The Way Down
Listen to the unabridged sermon here: The Way Down
There’s a scene in The Princess Bride — you know the one — where the pastor stands before the gathered crowd and announces, “Love, true love, is why we are gathered here today.” It’s a great line for a wedding. But it’s also, in its own strange way, the right line for John 13.
Because as we turn to this chapter, we are gathered around something too: love. True love. Except the love we find here isn’t the happy, easy, effortless kind the world likes to sell us. The love we find in John 13 is discomforting. And that discomfort is the whole point.
We tend to measure love by how easy it feels. If the relationship is smooth, we’re “in love.” If it gets hard, something must be wrong. But Scripture tells a different story. The love of Jesus is self-sacrificial. It asks things of us that the world calls shameful. It is not the love of greeting cards. It is the love of a cross.
Baseball was fun today! Caught the end of the Tigers game after a cruise on river in Detroit at Atwater Brewery with a cute date.
I stumbled across this quote again and it is too good not to share.
This quote from Viktor Frankl referring to surviving the holocaust… 🥺
Held
Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Held
This world often feels like it’s spinning out of control. You look at the news, you look around, and it just feels that way. There’s an old country song by Joe Diffie called “Third Rock from the Sun” that captures it — this sense that we live on a planet hurtling through space, and things are out of control. There’s another song, from Stephen Curtis Chapman, that answers it: God is still the King of the jungle. He’s the Lion of Judah who sits on His throne, and He is still in control.
Blind Spot
Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Blind Spots
John 7–9
We’re taking a big swing this week — three chapters at once, John 7, 8, and 9. It’s a lot of ground, but these chapters actually hang together as one connected sermon of their own. John gives us a point, then an illustration. Another point, another illustration. Two claims from Jesus, two stories that show us what those claims mean in real life. And all of it happens against the backdrop of one specific moment: Jesus at the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem.
Do You Want What Jesus Gives or Do You Want Jesus?
Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Do You Want What Jesus Gives or Do You Want Jesus?
Some Sundays in a series like this, we get to sit for a long time in just a handful of verses. This week isn’t one of those weeks. John 5 and 6 together run nearly a hundred verses, and rather than crawl through them line by line, we’re going to take a big swing and look at three signs together: a healing at a pool, a feeding on a hillside, and Jesus walking on water in a storm. Each one asks us a question, and by the end, those three questions collapse into one question that might be the most important one we ever answer.
Some rounds of golf are more special than others. Ethan and I got to play nine holes with his Papa today at Cambridge Golf Course in Evansville, IN.
I am so grateful for the laughs and fun.
Faith My Eyes
Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Faith My Eyes
This week we pick the story back up in John 4, as Jesus leaves Samaria and returns to his home base in Galilee. He’s just spent two days doing something no self-respecting Jewish teacher was supposed to do — hanging out with Samaritans, crossing every cultural line in the book. And when he finally gets back to Cana, the place where he turned water into wine, he doesn’t exactly get a hero’s welcome.