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The Greatest Value

Jesus told a parable of a man who found a treasure hidden in a field and a businessman who found a precious pearl. Here are the stories:  “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all […]

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Awesome, Terrible, and the Meaning of It All

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been in the middle of reading Romans 9, 10, and 11 during our “Bible time” with my family. We read a little bit each morning and just talk through what we have read as we eat our cereal, or in the case of some of my kids, last night’s […]

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Sabbath Rest

Where we are here in Catania, we have taken particular notice that the churches that we are connected with don’t celebrate, or really barely even mention various religious holidays. For example, neither Christmas nor Easter, days that in America, we in the church would consider to be fairly important for remembering the birth of Jesus […]

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The Scapegoat

In my last post on the Lamb of God, I mentioned a meeting where we spoke about John 1:29. Here is what it says in John: The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! John 1:29 As we were […]

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The Lamb of God

Yesterday, a few of us met together to continue reading John 1, this time focusing on verses 19 through 34 focusing on John the Baptist and what he said both about himself and about Jesus. At one point, we read verses 35 and 36 which say: The next day John was there again with two […]

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The Son of Man

Writing my last post on doing your research, combined with our family’s recent reading and study in the book of Revelation, and connected with my day-to-day work where I am routinely sharing my faith with non-believers, I was thinking about a particular subject that I wanted to write about here. This subject is related to […]

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God is about to do something great

The title of this post is a refrain that I have heard throughout my life in the church. I’ve heard this regularly from pastors, from people who are explaining what they believe is a prophecy from God, or just from someone who is telling us what they think God is doing within us or around […]

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Redeemed

This scene is from a video series that was recently released called The Chosen. It is a dramatization that pulls together the writer’s ideas about certain Biblical characters and gives extra, non-Biblical storyline in an attempt to provide context for the time that Jesus begins his ministry. If you’re interested in seeing more, I recommend […]

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Rapid Growth?

As I was growing up, I was a competitive swimmer. From the time that I was 10 until 18, I swam as part of several clubs and school teams. At Eastern High School, the school that I went to from my earliest days, there was a poster that hung on the wall. It was a […]

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Baptism in the Name of Jesus

I have recently had some conversations with some friends within our discipleship network about baptism. A video, in fact, was sent to me with a teaching on why we should baptize in the name of Jesus instead of in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as Jesus says in Matthew […]