A Day is coming that will be the end of everything...or at least everything as we know it. The timing of the End of Time will not be chosen by rulers in the human realm, national politics, environmental disruption, or a chance collision with meteors from space.
Read MoreIn the first part of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught a high and holy Law where absolute love is the supreme goal. Then He taught that His disciples what it would look like to honor it perfectly. The vision of Kingdom love that the Lord presented on the mountain is so achingly pure and obviously holy that humanity naturally praises it and longs for it.
Read MoreMatthew wrote the Sermon on the Mount to teach what it means to be a disciple of Christ. In the final three pictures that Jesus gave, He showed the difference between those who are truly members of His Kingdom and those who are not.
Read MoreMatthew wrote the Sermon on the Mount to show us all the things Jesus taught as He went about the countryside in Galilee. It gives us the big picture of what He said about life in the Kingdom of Heaven. Many of those ideas are also told in the book of Luke, but they are scattered throughout his book as Luke showed how Jesus was teaching those things along the way.
Read MoreJesus continued to journey about the countryside telling everyone the Good News and healing the sick. One day He travelled to a city called Nain. His newly appointed disciples were with Him, and they were followed by a huge crowd.
Read MoreIn the midst of Christ's busy ministry of teaching and healing throughout the region of Galilee, one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to dine in his home. Many of the Pharisees had already rejected the Messiah completely, but this one was still struggling with how to understand the coming of Jesus and His remarkable miracles.
Read MoreJesus and His disciples went out once again to the cities around the Sea of Galilee. He proclaimed the Good News of the Kingdom of God to everyone who came to Him. There was a group of women who came along with them as well.
Read MoreJesus and His disciples were in Capernaum, surrounded by the crowd. They were all packed into Peter’s house as Jesus preached. Religious leaders had come up from Jerusalem to challenge Jesus. The Lord had already cast out a demon and healed a man of blindness right in front of everyone.
Read MoreImagine if the powerful religious leaders of your day journeyed to find you so they could confront you. Men from the Temple in Jerusalem in the South of Israel had travelled all the way to the North to do just that. Jesus had a lot of choices that He could have made.He could have hid from them...and then gossiped about them for the next 20 years.
Read MoreJesus had begun to speak to His disciples in parables about the Kingdom of Heaven. The rest of the crowd was still there as Jesus preached from the boat, but for most of them, these stories would be a mystery.
Read MoreWhen Jesus started His preaching ministry, He warned the people about the Day of the Lord, the final stage of The Great Battle over human history. It is the time when Christ will return to complete His total and utter victory against the curse that Adam and Eve had brought into the world.
Read MoreJesus continued to teach parables to help his disciples understand how the Kingdom of God would work in the world as true believers waited for Him to return.
Read MoreJesus spent another remarkable day teaching and healing the broken. By the time evening had come, the Lord was tired. That might seem surprising since Jesus was God. Can God get tired? Well, the truth is that Jesus was and is fully God, but during His time on earth, He willingly laid aside the privileges of His divine powers. He took on the form of a man when He came to save humanity (Phil. 2:5-11). That included taking on our human frailties.
Read MoreImagine what it was like to be a disciple of Jesus. They saw Him heal with a power nobody had ever seen before. They stood by Him as He confronted the most influential men of His day. They watched Him silence the storm with a word.
Read MoreIn this story, Jesus was continuing to give His faithful witness of the Gospel in the region Galilee in spite of the hard-heartedness of the people. Where was the repentance that should have marked the children of God when their Savior came?
Read MoreAfter healing the blind men and the mute in Capernaum, Jesus made His way back to His hometown of Nazareth. That was a pretty bold thing to do. The last time we read about Christ visiting there, the townspeople tried to throw Him off a cliff!
Read MoreYou may have noticed on these blogs about the life of Jesus that the stories from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John get a little mixed up. For example, when in the book of Matthew we read from chapter eight before we read chapters 5 through 7, which are the Sermon on the Mount.
Read MoreThe time had come for the Lord to prepare His disciples for when it would be their job to tell the world what God had done through the work of His Son. Jesus was going to offer His life to pay for the sins of humanity. Through His sacrifice He was going to utterly defeat sin and death.
Read MoreJesus continued to prepare His disciples for the task ahead.They had been given the breathtaking honor of being the messengers of God to a dying world, but it wasn’t going to be easy. In a world full of toxic sin and rebellion, God’s holy truth brings anger, rejection, even violence.
Read MoreThere are some things that are so purely beautiful that the goodness in them is obvious. There is no need to explain that a night of brilliant stars against an inky black sky is glorious, that crashing waves are magnificent, or that a rose is an image of elegance.
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