Genesis 1 opens with God making light, separating waters, drawing land from sea. By the fourth day, he turns his attention to the sky: Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years. Genesis…
A Deed God Hates Who are the Nicolaitans? Revelation 2:6 names them once, inside Christ’s commendation of the church at Ephesus, and the words are strong: But this thou hast, that thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolaitanes, which I also hate. (Revelation 2:6, KJV) Whatever the Nicolaitans were, God hates their deeds. And yet…
The word “church” has so much religious weight attached to it that it is easy to miss what it actually means. Or rather, what it replaced. The Greek word behind every occurrence of “church” in the New Testament is ekklesia. It is a compound word: ek — out of, away from — and kaleō — to call. The called-out ones….
The Clock Is a Recent Invention The clock is a modern tool, and a useful one — it lets us schedule our lives down to the minute, and our machines down to the nanosecond. But it also hands us a more hurried, hectic pace. There is an appointment; we don’t want to be late; we…
Most of the world assumes the answer is no — that things unfold by accident, or that if there is a plan, it is locked away where no one can reach it. Scripture says otherwise. And it says the plan has a center. God “made known to us the mystery of his will according to…
Most of us have been completely disconnected from the bread-making process. We buy bread in a plastic bag. If we bake at home, we buy a packet of dry yeast from the store — a uniform, commercial, predictable powder that activates on demand and does its job without much thought from us. That is not…
This is the second of two sermons I gave in the fall of 2000, at a United Church of God congregation in Cincinnati — about twenty-five years ago, a month after the one on Trumpets. As with the first, I’ve left it close to how it was spoken and cleaned it up only enough to…
This is a sermon I gave in the fall of 2000, at a United Church of God congregation in Cincinnati — about twenty-five years ago. I’ve left it close to how it was spoken and cleaned it up only enough to read smoothly. I see some of it differently now, and I worded parts of…