As I was saying (see previous post), many of the people we meet in the Christmas story (see Matthew chapters 1 & 2 and Luke 1 & 2) are expecting miracles and God keeps sending them. And maybe those two things are not unrelated (ps: they are related). On the other hand, others in the […]
Category: Scripture
I will be honest with you. I am not one of those jaded, post-consumer minded anti-holiday bah-humbugs when it comes to Christmas. I love Christmas, hands down my favorite time of the year. Love it all: the lights, the music, the holiday movies and specials, the gifts, the parties and dinners. Yep, it’s all just […]
Don’t know exactly where I came across the expression, maybe I thought of it myself (unlikely, but possible). Anyway, I say it all the time, so much so that people around me have taken to saying it too. It goes like this: unexpressed gratitude is ingratitude. Ingratitude is a big problem because what we do […]
This weekend we are celebrating Stewardship Sunday all weekend long. It is the one time of the year when we reflect on the financial stewardship of Church of the Nativity. We have been increasingly disciplined about this in recent years, eliminating fundraisers and other distractions from the giving God wants. We talk about giving that […]
This is the final week of our current message series, “Life Apps.” We’ve been talking about the application of God’s word in our lives. Over the past few weeks we’ve looked at forgiveness, confession, encouragement and trust as life applications, basics in our approach to life and relationships. I have really enjoyed this series because […]
I have been reading Pastor Andy Stanley’s new book, out this week, “Deep & Wide.” He says it’s a book about “creating churches unchurched people love to attend.” My kind of book about my kind of church. The only time the word “church” is used in the four Gospels comes in the Gospel of Matthew. […]
This morning we had an all-call staff gathering to take a look at the new church year (2012-2013), which starts today. After Mass, we gathered for bagels and coffee and some great sharing all about the amazing time that is just ahead for us. Tom, my associate, gave an overview of what’s ahead for our […]
This weekend brings an end to summer, an end to our final summer message series. We’ve been discussing the Holy Spirit and we called the series “The Other Guy” because the Spirit can sometimes seem like the forgotten member of the Trinity. Bottom line, the Spirit is a person. And you can have a relationship […]
This is the third and final segment in my a reflection this past week asking the question, “What is going on?” as in, “What is going on in churchworld?” Things no longer seem to be going well in many, many different slices of church life across the country, and why that is so, or how […]
And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit Acts 2.4 We have begun our second series of the summer, taking a look at the Holy Spirit, the overlooked and misunderstood person of the Blessed Trinity. The Spirit is a person, by the way, and we can have a relationship with that person, and we […]
