I spent much of Thursday afternoon and Friday morning last week in correspondence with other pastors as we tried to figure out what we’re going to do in response to what we saw transpiring around us. We all had the same sense that this had gone from a concern to DEFCON 5 in just a…
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Did you know magazine ads and press releases once celebrated the health and lifestyle benefits of building with asbestos and smoking? Decades later we look back on that and think, “How silly!” But at the time, people who smoked or handled asbestos had no idea what they were dealing with. This was a significant cultural…
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The year: 1777. The pastor: Nicholas Street. The place: East Haven, Connecticut. The situation: The Revolutionary War. Just months after the American colonies declared independence from England, Street preached a sermon that applied Old Testament Bible stories to Revolutionary War events. The title of the sermon: “The American States Acting over the Part of the Children of Israel…
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With the tragic and evil events of Charlottesville still firmly implanted in our collective conscience, Christians need to speak with clarity on this topic. One of the first topics on the agenda needs to be drawing a line in the sand between racial supremacy and Christianity. They are mutually exclusive. Here are three reason racial…
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Perhaps the most famous biblical story is David and Goliath. So many people understand this to be a call for us to trust God in the face of the giants we face, but the Bible isn’t about us. It’s about Jesus Christ. So if the story of David and Goliath is ultimately about him, we…
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Job is one of the most read stories in all the world even to this day. You know the story. Job is a very godly man whom God himself speaks highly of. God permits Satan to ravage Job’s life. Once wealthy, he becomes impoverished. He loses everything. Once blessed with ten children, all ten are…
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Joseph and his brothers marry and have children and their children have children until they become a great nation: Israel. So great have their numbers become in Egypt that the king of Egypt enslaves them in forced labor enforced by brutality and oppression. God sees the injustice his people have to endure and has compassion…
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Remember Joseph and the technicolor dream coat? Joseph was betrayed by his own brothers and sold as a slave in a foreign land. Years later Joseph finds himself sitting at the King of Egypt’s right hand; second in command of that great nation with incredible power to wield as he sees fit. On a seemingly…
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Later in Abraham’s life, after a decades long battle with infertility, God blessed Abraham and his wife Sarah with a son, Isaac. God tested Abraham’s loyalty by instructing Abraham to sacrifice his only son on an altar. Just as Abraham was about to plunge the dagger into the soft flesh of his boy, God stopped…
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Picture yourself sitting in your living room one day. God comes to you and speaks to you audibly and says, “Brian, pack up a few things and leave the Fox Cities. I’m sending you to a country you know nothing about. Its culture, language, food, and people will all be foreign to you. I want…
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