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Fire – Lamentations 1:13
Discussing the symbolism of fire in scripture, highlighting its dual nature as both a sign of divine acceptance and judgment. It reflects on personal suffering and God’s sovereignty, emphasizing that while God’s fire can refine and cleanse, it often accompanies lament and discomfort, aligning with the broader pursuit of righteousness.
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What Is Biblical Literacy?
We complain about it, write about it, claim it’s important or even critical, design programs to create it, but what is it? I don’t mean that none of us know what we mean when we say “biblically literate” or “biblically illiterate,” but do we all mean the same thing? I don’t think we do, and…
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Fences: Mending or Rending
The following is a sermon I presented at the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Pensacola on September 11,2005 and originally posted here on September 13, 2005. I’m reposting it because when I went to look for it, I found that the original post had somehow been truncated, and also because there is a one word at a…
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Experiencing the (Baptism of the) Holy Spirit
This is a topic where I tend to make just about everyone uncomfortable. Long time readers may recall a previous discussion of speaking in tongues, and my own experience of it. Those who expect me to be intellectually oriented and rational are uncomfortable with mystical experiences, and many who are comfortable with the mystical experiences…
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Psalm 119:29 – Grace Me with Your Instruction
Deceitful ways turn aside from meand graciously give me your instruction [Torah]. It’s hard to read this verse when we use “law” as the English gloss for Torah. Graciously give me your rules? Graciously let me live in your rules? But that none of those are actually bad translations. Law or instruction, and the Torah…
Lazy Labeling
I frequently hear various people complain about labeling. We shouldn’t label people, they tell me. But labeling is essential. Language wouldn’t function without labels. For example, sitting right next to me as I write this is a cat. I label him “cat” and I tell you he’s a cat, and we communicated. Behold, the cat,…
Psalm 119:28 – Raise Me Up
My soul weeps from grief,Strengthen me according to your word. There are, as always, a number of directions I could go, and that I’d like to go, starting from this verse. I just want to mention one I’m not going to pursue. Recently I had occasion to discuss grief and suffering as discussed in the…
Psalm 119:27 – From Precepts to Wonders
Explain to me the way of your preceptsand I will tell of your wonderful acts. We tend to think of particular rules or principles for living as fairly boring, somewhat annoying, and often unreasonably restrictive. We seem to live in a debate between what we ought to do and what we actually do. Even the…
Psalm 119:26 – Just Talking
I tell you my stuff and you answer me.Teach me your statutes. I frequently comment that “always and everywhere there is stuff.” There is stuff to do, stuff not to do, stuff that I did, and stuff that I didn’t do. Not to mention the physical stuff to keep, stuff to get rid of, and…
Psalm 119:25 – In the Dust
My soul is down in the dust.Give me life according to your word. Psalm 119 is an interesting–and biblical–combination of human action and dependence on Divine action. Verse 25, the first verse of the third section, is on the dependence side of the scale. If you’re trying to formulate theology, the variety here might be…
Psalm 119:24
Your testimonies are also my delight,My counselors [the men of my counsel]. I like to say that we tend to go to the Bible for information, while God is there for conversation. I don’t mean that there is no information there. We tend to think in binary terms: Either the Bible is a source of…
Psalm 119:23 – What Others Think
Prince sit around and plot against me,Your servant meditates on your statutes. To be honest, my first reaction to this verse was a laugh. Yeah, right, I thought. He really can sit meditating on God’s statutes while he knows people are plotting against him. That thought isn’t entirely wrong. This really is a high-minded, and…
Psalm 119:22 – Reproach and Contempt
Remove from me reproach and contemptfor I have guarded your testimonies. Meditating on a single verse each day means I often get somewhat out of context. But while context is important, literature can easily suggest other lines of thinking. Folks in various classes I’ve taught have called me the king of the rabbit trail because…
Psalm 119:21 – Pride and Staggering
You rebuke the proud, accursed ones,Who stagger away from your commands. As with each verses, there are lots of directions my mind goes with this, for example, what it means to be “accursed” and what, in particular, one might be proud of. But the direction my mind went was simply this: Pride goes before destruction…
Psalm 119:20 – Languishing
I [my soul] languish for longingfor your judgments. What do you really want? What is your deepest desire? What is missing that makes you weary? As I write this, I’m very tired. I’ve been busy with many things and am only writing because I committed myself to write as a spiritual discipline. This is the…
Psalm 119:19 – An Alien
An alien am I on the earth.Don’t hide your commands from me. I frequently teach that there are two elements to the Christian life: Identity and Mission. It’s easy to go off the rails on the side of identity, trying to separate ourselves from the crowd. On the other hand, we can become so much…
Psalm 119:18
Open my eyes and I will seeWonderful things from your Torah. In my infographic on Seven Barriers to Hearing the Word the third barrier is making your Bible study a scholarly, rather than a spiritual pursuit. Now let me be clear that I’m not against scholarship. Reading biblical languages and understanding various scholarly areas of…
Psalm 119:17 – Order of Operations
Deal fully with your servant,So I may live and keep your word. There are numerous translation questions, including differences of opinion about precisely what the word I translate “deal fully with” actually means in this context. Another good option is what Bob MacDonald does in Seeing the Psalter: Grow your servantI will live and keep…
Book Extract: The Heart Cries Out on Psalm 119
Book Extract: The Heart Cries Out on Psalm 119 Psalm 119 is easily the longest psalm in the Bible, at 176 verses. It is composed as an acrostic, with a stanza of eight verses for each of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. It is a meditation and a teaching on the Law of…
Psalm 119:16 – Ways to Forget
In your statutes I delight.I will not forget your word. If this were not poetry, I might be tempted to talk about the rather optimistic promise of not forgetting God’s word. But then I remember how many times I have said, “I’m not going to forget that” in reference to some planned task or another….
Psalm 119:15: Looking at God’s Ways
On your precepts will I meditate;I will look at your ways. There’s a big difference between meditation and biblical exegesis. I tend to use exegesis to refer to extracting the meaning from a text in the narrow sense of what a particular author meant by a particular statement or passage. Hermeneutics generally refers to the…
Psalm 119:14 – I Have to Be Joyful Too?
In the way of your testimonies I rejoiceAs over great wealth. Teachers and preachers often say that Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, was moving the law inside and making it of the heart. And that is certainly a theme of that sermon. But the fact is that the heart was always the object…
The Importance and Durability of Words
Through a Facebook comment on my post yesterday, The Importance of Things Left Out, another thought came to me connected to my other post yesterday, Psalm 119:13 – Speaking It. The comment made my push my memory for when it was that my mother made the comment on Hannah and Elkanah in 1 Samuel 1,…
Psalm 119:13 – Speaking It
With my lips I have recountedAll the judgments from your mouth. We tend to talk, and also write a great deal about speaking. On social media, people take note of the things you don’t speak out about, and consider you apathetic for your apparent silence. On the other hand, there are those who are just…
The Importance of Things Left Out
As I was listening to 1 Samuel today while walking on my treadmill I was reminded of a comment my mother once made on the story. We learn about Hannah and her desire for a son, and her sadness that she was barren. Her husband, Elkanah, somewhat full of himself, wonders why she’s crying and…
A Video for My Book Identifying Your Gifts and Service
A Video for My Book Identifying Your Gifts and Service
Psalm 119:12 – Teach Me
Blessed are you LORD.Teach me your statutes. Mark Twain said, “Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.” Or something like that. I’ve found a number of variations, all attributed to Twain. The prayer, “Teach me!” is one that is pretty much guaranteed an answer, positive at least in the sense that…
Ask Them to Implement Their Own Suggestion
Bad Ideas I Learned from Good Leaders #1 I’m never going to identify which leader I learned these things from, because I have deep respect for all of them. Many of them helped me ditch bad ideas of my own, though doubtless I still have a bunch! The bad thing I learned is this: When…