ken wilson online

Thanks I needed that break.  Vacation did me a world of good as well as a mission trip to Costa Rica with our youth group.  Costa Rica, where the average income is $250 per month.  A week there convinced me of something: I’m greedy.

The greedy are nailed throughout the Bible as sinners of a serious variety.  The prophets denounce the greedy.   Paul has more than a warning or two.  The greedy are among those who shouldn’t presume on entrance to the kingdom. Jesus didn’t make it easy for the greedy to follow without leaving much of their stuff behind.
Read the rest of this entry »

Well I’ve gone and made a few of you nervous, which means we’ve got a good conversation going about Jesus and Paul and understanding this book that is so important to us or we wouldn’t bother.  In some of the comments to my previous post I detected a certain unease about the idea that there might be any difference in the relative weight or significance of various biblical writers or books in the Bible.  As if any suggestion of such a difference entailed a rejection of parts of the received text of Scripture.
Read the rest of this entry »

My father-in-law, Stanley Rozell, used to talk about hitting the ball “down the center of the middle.”  What was the center of the middle of the church’s message?  They devoted themselves to “the apostles’ teaching” said Luke, the author of Acts.  What did that refer to in historical context?  It referred to the remembered words and deeds of Jesus now compiled  in the gospels and to whatever the risen Jesus taught between the first Easter Sunday and Ascension Thursday. The only references we have to this post-resurrection instruction indicate that it was focused on the messianic meaning of Moses and the Prophets and Jesus’ take on “the kingdom of God.”   That’s what they devoted themselves to.  How about us?
Read the rest of this entry »

Paul, the old guy, advises Timothy, the younger guy, to be careful about empowering “new converts” too much too fast in the leadership department because they are more prone to “conceit.”  As Bob Dylan sang, “there’s a whole lot of people dying tonight, from the disease of conceit.”  Defined as “a high opinion of your own qualities or abilities, especially one that is not justified.”  And there’s the rub, right?  When we’re young, we’re worried about our qualities and abilities.  We fear that our qualities and abilities are inadequate for the pastoring task. Which means we crave confident assurance that we’re wrong about our fears regarding ourselves.
Read the rest of this entry »

Bob Dylan produced three albums during his openly Jesus-faith period: Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love. Somewhere along the line, something happened and Dylan went icognito with his faith. One can only imagine he overdosed on something–not Jesus most likely but something on the religious landscape burned him bad. There’s a hint, maybe in The Disease of Conceit, recorded after his out there Jesus time. It’s written in the cadence of an old tent revival and it happens to be about the occupational hazard of religion.
Read the rest of this entry »