Talking about grace and works in Sunday school, using Peterson’s book on Ephesians. I get the struggle. I understand that guilt and self-reliance push us to try to earn God’s favor by our good deeds.  But at the same time, I also think we set up a false dichotomy between the spiritual (grace) and the physical (works) to the point that we want to dismiss the physical as irrelevant to our lives of faith. But the lesson from the New Testament is that the Lord of Eternity is also Lord of the Present. Remember the story of the healing of …

I have asked this before, and I probably will again, because it is a really good start-thinking-about-what-it-means-to-be-a-follower question. Yes, that sentence did set a record for most hyphens in one compound adjective. What does your Jesus look like? Not the stained-glass guy behind the baptistery, but the one who walked this earth 2,000 years ago. What did he look like? How did he sound? Did he like the foods you like? How did he smell? Would he have fit in with your friends? At your church? Did he have good manners? Think about it for a minute while we go …

I guess post-Mother’s Day, it’s okay to write this one. My Mom had an interesting relationship with God, or, at least, an interesting understanding of her relationship with God. Perhaps it was a little shy on the grace measure of things. She had this great fear that God was going to spring the big one on her, the demand that she would have to do something she really did not want to do. Jonah became the operative story for her—and China her Nineveh. She passed away with fears unrealized; God let her live out her life as a pastor’s wife …