A Tough Promise to Keep Have you ever made a promise you regretted?  Given your word and then realized the price was way too high but couldn’t find a graceful way to back out? Happened different times in the bible.  Herod had John the Baptist arrested because John wouldn’t stop harping on the fact that…

And here we are at the end of Moments of Grace. Over the past seven weeks we have seen how Grace has been experienced and expressed throughout the Bible and we’ve looked at Grace displayed in an unlikely person, in an unlikely place, at an unlikely time and two weeks ago we saw how Jesus…

Long before I knew about God’s grace I knew about Gods’ wrath.  Long before I had encountered a loving God I knew about the fires of hell. Some of those images came from culture and some came from art.  All in all I think I prefer Larson to Michelangelo, but I’m that kind of guy.…

It’s one of those bizarre stories in the Bible that make you scratch your head and say:  Huhh?  And it’s one of those stories that people sometimes ask me about, it really seems more fitting in the Old Testament than as one of the first stories about the early church in the New Testament.  This…

Skeletons in God’s Closet, intro They are lurking in of our closets, things that we wished we had never done, words we wished we had never spoken.  Families have them, churches have them and individuals have them.  Because we all make mistakes.  We all have skeletons in our closets.  Some are scarier than others but…

That’s right, Gilligan’s Island and the Seven Deadly sins.  Seems like a bit of a stretch but I thought it would be a fun study for the depths of winter and it starts next Sunday night at 6:30. And for many people the one thing that this fifty-year-old sitcom and a list of sins that…

Christmas is all about Hope. Start with clip from opening of A Charlie Brown Christmas  Contrary to what Linus thought, Charlie Brown was in good company, there are all kinds of folks who feel the same way about Christmas.  They are confused because they don’t feel jolly, they aren’t experiencing Christmas cheer and they don’t…

Last week we celebrated Christmas with our children’s presentation, which I’m sure Marilyn and her crew would testify is kind of like herding cats.  And that was part of the process that led Charlie Brown to ask in frustration, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” And that is the question that…

For millions of people over the past fifty years the only exposure they have had to the bible happened each Christmas as Linus read Luke chapter 2 verses 8 to 14 from the King James version in response to Charlie Brown’s questions:  Doesn’t anyone know what Christmas is all about. And when Linus is done…

Wow, it’s been fifty years.  Sure doesn’t seem like it.  December 9th will be the 50th anniversary of the first showing of Charlie Brown Christmas.  And while most of us grew up watching the animated special there were a number of hesitations about the show when it was aired.  As a matter of fact, for…