Faith Like Abram: A Chicago Update

Abram’s family must have thought he was crazy. He left his family and the security of his ancestral home to go to a land that he did not know. More than that, he left to go to an unspecified place. He didn’t leave to go to a place he had heard of but never visited. He went to a completely unknown land. All he knew was that he needed to go.

I feel a bit like Abram. My wife and I will be moving to Chicagoland in September. We’re not moving because of a job. We don’t have those lined up yet. We’re not moving because we know someone. Neither of us have family in the area we’re moving to. We don’t even have a place to stay when we move there. What we do know is that God has called us and so we’re going. Against conventional wisdom, without friends and family, because we want to be obedient to God.

The Choice at the Tree

We make choices every day. We choose when to get up, what to wear and eat. When we choose, we use our judgement on what is the best choice. We do most or all of this without really thinking about it. Sometimes we come to an important decision and then we agonize over the right thing to do. But for most of us, our daily life is full of choices that we don't even think about.

For my second installment in this series, The Trees in Eden, I want to talk about the second tree: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Like the tree of life, we see echos of this tree throughout scripture. Where echos of the tree of life pointed us to temples, echos of this tree point us to crucial decisions. What I find fascinating about the echos of this tree is that every decision is really the same decision that Adam and Eve had in the garden.

Lead Us Not Into Temptation

I want to start this entry in the series with a question. What is your biggest temptation? It might be those cupcakes that coworker brought into work. It might be speeding. For some it will be a bottle of alcohol, for others heroin or meth. For over half of men the answer to that question would be porn. What I want you to see is that there are temptations all around us. Everyday. We cannot escape temptation. And yet for most this is a petition to God for escape from a life of temptation. But that is not really what Jesus is teaching us.

Your Prayers are Pointless

Recently my church had a showing of War Room. The plot of the movie revolves around a middle class African American family. The couple and their daughter are in the midst of struggles that would seem familiar to many families. They don't seem to love each other anymore and both are ignoring their daughter. The wife finds a mentor and seeks to change her family through prayer.

By the end of the movie the family is happily back together. The wife still meets with her mentor, but now seeks to find someone else to pour into. The thrust of the movie is that the prayer of the wife changed the family. Prayer works . . . at least in this movie.

Advent: Hope

Last time I talked about the fact that Advent is about waiting. I mentioned that just like Abram waited for a son, and Israel waited for a savior, we wait for the second coming. This week I want to talk about something that goes hand in hand with waiting. I want to talk about hope.

Advent: Waiting

So this is the first week of Advent. It always seems weird to me that churches that do not hold to the whole of the calendar still use Advent. But that is a blog for another day. Advent means coming. It is the season when we eagerly anticipate the birth of our savior Jesus Christ. That means that it is a season of waiting.