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June 11 - June 24, 2025
“Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.”
You will have to either run away screaming in anger and fear or run toward him with joy and love and fall down at his feet and say, “I am yours.” Nothing in the middle makes any sense. Unless you are running away from him or running toward him, you actually don’t really know who he is.
He was not basing his identity on Jesus’s great love for him but on his great love for Jesus. That meant that while Jesus was Peter’s teacher, Peter was being his own savior.
“The glory of our Lord Jesus Christ which is revealed in Scripture … [is] … the principal object of our faith, love, delight, and admiration. … The only true guide in this [is not] fancy and imagination [but] Scripture revelation.”
where Christ is,
who is your life,
heart’s affections
When you are downcast, or tempted, or angry, or frightened, ask yourself, “Have I made something else ‘my life’? That is, have I put something in the center of my life that doesn’t belong there?” To “set your heart on things above,” look at the thing and say, “You are not my life. Only Christ is my life. You’re a good thing but I don’t need you to have life and joy. Christ is my life and joy.”
the sincerity of your love
Belief in the resurrection should be the end of the calculation in relationships. It should be the end of the constant, semiconscious inner monologue: “Do I like this person? Do they appreciate and thank me enough? Is this person worth my time?”
[He is] trying to shame them for having lawsuits at all. Such matters are “trivial”; they add up to zero in light of the eschatological judgment.
which Jesus says will “recompense” for all,
his call to tolerance and graciousness to opponents is grounded in the future.
To live in light of that great day when perfect justice will be done and all things will be put right is to live a life free from the need to pay people back or hold grudges.
he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.”(1
During his trials he calmly and briefly witnessed to the truth (cf. John 18:23), but this was not because Jesus was some stoic who had learned emotional detachment. Rather, he “entrusted himself” to the true Judge.
The word meant any sexual intimacy outside an exclusive marriage relationship, not only adultery but premarital sex.
Paul did not merely say, “It’s a good idea to avoid porneia as much as you can.” He says to flee it—stay free from it at all costs.
Against this Paul said that the resurrection of Jesus proves that the physical body is of greatest importance, that Jesus died to redeem not merely our souls but our bodies
Paul was quoting Genesis 2:24, that when God brought Eve to Adam they became “one flesh.” From earliest times Jewish and Christian commentators recognized that “one flesh” referred not just to sexual union. The term was a metonymy. The physical union of two persons’ bodies pointed to the complete union of every aspect of their lives—spiritual, emotional, social, economic, legal.
any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.”
Far from devaluing sex, the very opposite comes about. In this area Paul was far ahead of first-century cultural assumptions in perceiving the sexual act as one of intimacy and self-commitment which involved the whole person; not the mere manipulation of some “peripheral” function of the body. … In the context equally of union with Christ and of physical union the issue becomes one of fully “giving” oneself to the one to whom one belongs.
who are the same—as in two human beings or as in two divine persons
The rich man has no name because that was all he was. He had built an identity around his power. He was a rich man or nobody. Without his wealth—without good things—there was no self left. Lazarus, however, had a life full of hard things but had evidently become a man of faith and virtue. It may be that the hard things drove him toward God, where he found himself.
God’s goodness, in general, comes to us through experiences of difficulty and weakness,
So at the very end of his life, Jacob gently instructed Joseph to accept God’s ways of free grace and counterintuitive salvation. He looks back on his life and no longer says, “Everything is against me!” as he once did (Genesis 42:36). That was tantamount to saying, “All things are working together for evil for me.” It seemed to him that God was behind the scenes, working at every point to hurt him and make him miserable. Now he says that God has been his shepherd “all my life to this day” (Genesis 48:15), and he even says that the Angel of the Lord “delivered me from all harm” (Genesis
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taking their pain and suffering to God, praying through it in his presence, and thereby avoiding the anger, self-pity, and despair that can poison hearts and make us bitter and harder rather than wiser and better.
they were renewing him. They were making him more like Christ, finding his joy in God, his peace in God’s love, his meaning in God’s calling.
preparing him for this future, eternal glory.
better and better prepared to experience and receive something.
“If we are satisfied with vague ideas about him we shall find no transforming power communicated to us. But when we cling wholeheartedly to him and our minds are filled with thoughts of him and … delight … in him then spiritual power will flow from him to purify our hearts, increase our holiness, strengthen our graces, and sometimes fill us with joy inexpressible and full of glory.”
palingenesia.
nuclear war or terrorism, famine or food shortages, climatic or topographical catastrophe, and plague or pandemic.
“boredom” as the fifth factor that could destroy us.
“What this state of mind [boredom] means in social and cultural terms is increasingly widespread and chronic indifference to ordinary values, pursuits, freedoms, and obligations. The present becomes a scene composed of the absurd, the irrelevant, and the demonic. So, necessarily does the past and of course, the future.”
What if this demonization prevents us from doing the same things?
But the secular idea of progress believes in nothing at all beyond this material world. This means not only that when we die as individuals we go to nothing, but also that human civilization itself will eventually disappear without a trace. In other words, the secular hope is only for a progress that is very temporary. It assumes that the actual destiny of human history is complete oblivion.
“What were your views about the ultimate future of civilization before the atomic bomb …? What did you think all this effort of humanity was to come to in the end? The real answer is known to almost everyone who has even a smattering of science. … The whole story is going to end in NOTHING.”
Many of my peers are bothered by the recent turn of events between the U.S., Iran, and Israel, because the nuclear bomb presents an unwelcome intrusion to our thoughts. We think that life is all meant to go well, that we are living in an age of progress, that we cannot go back to the primitive days of war, etc.
“faith in Jesus risen from the dead transcends but includes what we call history and what we call science.”
We insist to ourselves and others that “we have it sorted” and under control. But we do not—we never do. This is relative, “hope so” hope.
Christian hope means that I stop betting my life and happiness on human agency and rest in him.
Isaiah 40:31 says that those who “hope in the Lord” are not anxiously holding on but always “renewing their strength” and even “soaring.” Hope in God leads to “running and not growing weary” and “walking and not being faint.”
I cry to you for help, Lord; in the morning my prayer comes before you. Why, Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me? From my youth I have suffered and been close to death; I have borne your terrors and am in despair. Your wrath has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed me. All day long they surround me like a flood; they have completely engulfed me. You have taken from me friend and neighbor— darkness is my closest friend. (Psalm 88:13–18)
