Can you bear the weight of God's love placed upon you completely without merit? A love so strong that your only choice is to be carried away by its current to wherever it will have you go?

If the rebuke is done biblically, both are weighed down: one wears the millstone of rebuke, the other one wears the millstone of grief and prayer and hope. The one who rebukes, and the one who is rebuked, God help them -- they are stuck together.

This "you are what you do" has become so knotted in our collective psyche that it is not able to be disentangled without doing violence to the worlds we've built. If we are not what we do, what are we?

We are watchers instead of receivers, observers instead of lovers and laughers. And the simple truth is that for us who tend to operate as orphans and outsiders, God must make Christianity a family thing for us to believe in it.

Rather by Jesus’ strength in fulfilling the law we are able to bear an easier burden, the law without the weight of condemnation becomes beautiful. We learn from Him at the yoke and he shapes us into people who live ethically and lighten the burdens of others.

Judgment texts in the Bible are hard to preach, mostly because the audience never thinks the Bible is talking about them.

Jesus says that if you want to get to me, you have to honor the weak. To get to me you have to consider that this child of the King has done nothing, is not qualified in any way, is part of a class that had no clout whatsoever, whose place in the synagogue was non-existent. No real persons. And yet, from the very beginning God has made clear that his promise to humanity would be realized through the improbable faith delivered to children.

What if Jesus’ healing of the Demoniac means that there there is no uncleanness so possessing that God cannot declare us clean?

They knew of Jesus as a miracle worker, a healer, logic that could tie religious lawyers and scribes in knots, the Rabbi, the Master. But what do you really know about a person until your life depends on them?

Why does the sower do it? Why does Jesus toil in fields that will never bear fruit? Because he loves the soil. And I think he knows that we need to see Him rejected. God is willing to sow even to the bad fields - the back forty - because as it relates to salvation there’s no easy soil and all of us are hard of hearing. To give up on the hard soil is to give up on all of us.

The dead are buried and sometimes the living are buried right along with the dead. Jesus touched the Bier. A record scratched and the procession shuffled to a stop. The crowd craned their necks to see.

God can fill our stomachs all day long, but I think the harder thing is to fill the gut, the pit of the stomach, where all of the big decisions, and sometimes the big mistakes, are made.

Jesus means for us to lose our lives in the unspectacular, typical, everyday sense: to choose to not live a self-centered and self-focused life. To be at the service of the world around us, the world that demands your life. Your life is to be the center of blessing and of good-news; the bread of life set out for a starving world will be torn to pieces.

The hidden life leavening in secret eventually deforms to such a degree that it requires an outward, disfigured, increasingly desperate outer life. In fact the more powerful and confident the outward lie, the more cover it provides for the inward truth.

How we need to see not only the flesh of Jesus, and his cross, but one another’s holiness in the flesh, too. If we do not take one another more seriously, if we lose each other from our prayers we will lose our mind for God, too.

When we read the Proverbs we are learning about life in the world where God is King. Proverbs tells us how to live with skill in that world. What happens when that skill turns against us?

We are not consumers of religious concepts first, or critics of culture, but witnesses. You could be forgiven for thinking that the church is more interested in selling a truth than witnessing to it. What’s the difference between selling and witnessing?

If we want to talk about “attending” worship, then we mean it like attending the emergency room or attending your own wedding. These are not experiences; they are life-jackings. The worship service of the Lord Jesus is even more so. It is profound experience that truly nourishes and shapes us.

What this means is that the battle fo faith is between the temptation to have “kitchen faith” where you must provide for yourself, where you cook the meal, you are the people pleaser, and “table faith” where we joyfully receive from God as his treasured guest. One lives by works and the other by grace.