We took this trail over the course of two and a half hours, including a time to stop for lunch. There are nice views of the Etna peaks and a walk through both the lava fields as well as through the woods. This hike would be OK for our purposes with the people that we […]
In the Jewish law, ceremonial washing was required to allow a man or a woman to be ceremonially clean before God. There were several situations in which a person could be considered to be ceremonially unclean and need to be washed. Those might include: In addition, ceremonial washing was also frequently performed in advance of […]
Last night, as we talked about how the Israelites rejected God as their king, and as Jesus came, he looked to re-establish this relationship, a man in the group looked at me a couple of times and said simply: I lay my head down on my pillow and sleep well at night. This has a […]
As Jesus hung on the cross, the people passed by him and hurled insults at him. They were saying things like: Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God! Matthew 27:40 What the people failed to understand was that Jesus came for this very moment. Jesus specifically put himself in that […]
In Matthew 20, we see Jesus walking from Galilee to Judea, eventually on his way to Jerusalem. At one point, Jesus stops and pulls his disciples aside, yet again, and tells them that he will be condemned to death, mocked, flogged, and crucified, only to be resurrected and raised to life three days later. And […]
This morning, we were reading Matthew 10 as part of our team’s regular Bible study. Jesus sends out his disciples to the Israelite towns, but spends most of his time giving them a warning that persecution, beatings, and even death await them because they are his disciples and because of what he is sending them […]
Over the last several months, especially during the time of the pandemic starting in early 2020, and even more as governments around the world have issued “Green Passes” for vaccinations, a common topic of conversation amongst Christians that we have met has been the End Times, the time of the end of the world as […]
Each morning, our family reads the Bible together for about 30 minutes while we drink our coffee and eat breakfast. This week, leading up to our Christmas celebration, we have been reading a few selections from the Old Testament, working to understand together how God planned to bring the Messiah to the earth. This morning, […]
There is an interesting interview with Mark Zuckerberg at The Verge that talks about where Facebook intends to go, tying together some of their initiatives. Zuckerberg says that they are planning to build the “metaverse”, meaning, essentially, a separate world online. As he describes this new world, it sounds a lot like the movie Ready […]
This is the third lesson in a series on the mission of God. I started previously with a series of thoughts initially on the image of God filling the earth and then wrote the lesson itself over on the Search Party site. From there, we moved on to underline the idea that God’s mission should […]