Here is some counsel I gave someone who is a true and beautiful believer but who is having trouble, perhaps because of some bad teaching in their past, accepting that their faith in Christ is true: When Jesus died and said “it is finished”, it was finished. It is not dependent on some change in […]
“Someone died for this slightly off-base irritating brother. He is Abel offering his blood sacrifice, and love says I count his offering as sufficient.” From the book Grace in Community by Jim McNeely I wanted to return to the very powerful and fruitful story of Cain and Abel as it pertains to the idea of […]
We, as a group, are a community of sinners who have mercy and grace in His blood. We are new creatures in Christ, but sin still lives on in us as a kind of living dead zombie presence. We should be very very clear that the heart of the gospel is not that we are personally transformed. It is that we are justified. We are redeemed. We are reconciled.
In a recent post, Peter Rollins brings up an interesting idea about how many people base their relationships on what I would call false grace: … religion doesn’t simply offer a set of positions to conform to, it also offers the acceptable ways in which one can transgress these positions: it tells us both how […]
A freewheeling discussion about discipleship under grace with Jim McNeely and Dax Swanson. How did Jesus actually do discipleship? The answer is surprising! How does the gospel of grace inform our notion of discipleship?
The age old question: What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? Romans 6:1 (NASB) Why does this question keep coming up? Does grace grant us a license to sin? Why is this such an issue? This question is the perennial nut at the root of almost […]
I work in a very technical field. Right now I am between jobs, so I am learning some new things that a potential employer requires me to know. I will admit that I am very very tired of feeling overwhelmed and out of my depth. In my entire career in IT, I can’t remember a […]
There are people close to me who have been through a series of broken relationships, where they have moved in with someone, lived together with them for a time, and then for one reason or another, they have broken up. I am really sad to watch them walk through the fallout from it all. I […]
I lost my job recently. I’m actually not unhappy about it. The people there were wonderful, and it paid really well, and I think that what I did there really helped society. It ended well, and it really was time for me to go. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that I had that job. […]
It’s New Year’s! It’s a new year, and I’m always excited about that. This year is especially a time for me to set new directions, new career paths, new relationships, and new patterns and disciplines. However, I’ve learned about myself that the cliche can be true, that these things last only so long. You have […]