This Week's Reading: God’s invitation isn’t exclusive to the best and the brightest–no entrance exams to identify star pupils or selection camp to wash out the weak. He lovingly and fearlessly approaches the underestimated and overlooked to pick his team. It started with Israel, “the fewest of all peoples,” (Deut. 7:7), and Jesus continued the [...]

This Week's Reading: While the wider culture treats immigrants with varying degrees of contempt, the apostle Peter insinuates that citizens of Jesus’ nation have much to learn from our First Nations, African-American, Asian-American, Venezuelan, Ethiopian, Iranian, Nicaraguan, Ukrainian, Palestinian, Sudanese, Afghan, and Myanmarese brothers and sisters who grapple with the history and/or foreseeable future of [...]

This Week's Reading: Paul & Timothy begin their letter to the church in Philippi by giving the simplest, most direct version of their job description: servants of Jesus Messiah (1.1). Everything else they include in this brief “gospel-concentrate,”–the joy, suffering, exaltation, faith, obedience, salvation, and reconciliation–folds into this identity. Even in the face of dire [...]

This Week's Reading: Generosity, when it has matured, stems from a practice of contentment rooted in grateful response to God’s rescue. The command to “not fret” and “not be envious” (Ps. 37:1) is only possible for the one who “takes refuge in YHWH,” (Ps 37:40). In between the anxiety (37:1)  and salvation (37:39-40), we find [...]

This Week's Reading: Communion wasn’t instituted at Jesus’ death–it has been an eternal reality that predates humanity (17:24), humming behind everything good, true, and beautiful in the created world, and will reach glorious consummation at the “very end,” (13:1). Creation itself was birthed from the loving communion of the triune God, and Jesus’ own obedience [...]

This Week's Reading: Following their transformation from captive slaves to a free nation, Israel spent a year at Mount Sinai, struggling to understand what it meant to be YHWH’s community–His priestly partners to mediate the renewal of all of creation. Israel failed the terms of the partnership time and time again, until YHWH eventually declared [...]

This Week's Reading: It can feel hard to relate to Israel’s prophets, likely because we spend so much time and energy trying to appear as normal as possible. But Israel was in desperate need of a wake-up call, and “normal” no longer worked. So God assigned Hosea an odd demonstration of protest: he would marry [...]

This Week's Reading: Devotional Thought Like the whole story of the Bible, discipleship begins with God’s action – God’s initiative. Light shines in the darkness, where we are found. Our first step in the discipleship journey is response–response to God’s awesome arrival, brilliant presence, and bold invitation. We reject or receive; the Light either blinds [...]