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Daniel’s Prayer
With all that is happening in Ukraine this week it is difficult for me to focus on the assignment this morning. I would much rather go into a rant about Putin and the lunatics in this country who are supporting his invasion of a sovereign country in the vain hopes of recapturing a lost dream of domination and empire. That is what I would like to do but that is not what we are going to do. This morning as our final lesson in Daniel we are going to look at Chapter 9 and the prayer of Daniel. But before we do that we should take time to look back…
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Jacob Wrestles With God
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The Moment Between
The mix in the air sustaining us is 20% oxygen and 80% nitrogen. Oxygen is food for fire and nitrogen builds structure. We know too much oxygen is fatal and needs nitrogen’s stability but nitrogen needs oxygen’s ability to ignite. Every social and religious movement needs both and that is where the Apostle Paul and those who wanted to keep the new faith as part of the old conflicted. Paul was not just a breath of fresh air to Judaism. He was pure oxygen. The Swiss psychologist, Erik Erikson, studied men and women who start movements and wrote. “Virtually every leader of a movement for change has a San Andreas…
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Daniel 7: The Four Beasts
For thousands of years we have been curious about the end of the world. Some of the earliest literature in the we have is focused on how the everything will end. For the past 100 years in this country, Bible studies on the end times and Christian fiction have been best sellers. The more dangerous and filled with conflict our lives have become the more these books have increased in sales. The world seems like it is constantly on the eve of destruction. Wars and rumors of wars are good news for book sales about the doom awaiting us. Likely, everyone here read Hal Lindsay’s “The Late Great Planet Earth”…
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Jacob Wrestles With God
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A String Around The Tree
I was born in 1946 – one year after Torrey Johnson Billy Graham and Chuck Templeton met and formed Youth For Christ. For years I heard the stories of how Chuck was in fact the better preacher and everyone expected him to “turn the world around.” Known as the “gold-dust twins” Billy and Chuck travelled and preached together to large crowds of teenagers until 1948. It was then that Chuck decided he wanted more theological training and tried unsuccessfully to recruit Billy to go with him to Princeton Theological Seminary. While Billy Graham wrestled through his own spiritual crisis at Forest Home Retreat Center in California and concluded that even…
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Ezekiel 34-37
Four weeks ago we met the young Ezekiel who is called to be a whistleblower and to expose the corruption and degradation of the priests and leaders of those who have been left behind in Jerusalem. Instead of deliverance from Nebuchadnezzar they are going to be overwhelmed by his armies. God has left the Temple and Jerusalem. All that will remain in Jerusalem is what will remain in this world when the Church departs – a world without pity, mercy, justice, hope or pleasure. Only complete delusion. Evil that has been boiling below and ever present in the world will be revealed. What has been hidden will be obvious. In…
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Daniel and Belshazzar
With nothing being said, King Nebuchadnezzar has died and his son (or maybe his grandson) has assumed the throne. It’s gone so quickly, hasn’t it? We first met Daniel as a young man only five chapters ago and now here he is at 85. We know almost nothing from history about Belshazzar but what we do know suggests that he was a ruler serving under another ruler named Nabodinus. We don’t know but for the purposes of the story we’ll refer to Belshazzar as the King of Babylon as at the time of this story Nabodinus had just been killed in battle and so Belshazzar may have been giving this…
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A Proper Calling
Tomorrow afternoon I am going to interview Roy Goble about his new book, “Junkyard Wisdom Rebuilt” and one of the themes in the book and Roy’s life is his relationship with his father. I want to know more about that as it sounds like we had similar experiences. Before he died we took week-long trips together to walk and talk. Years ago while riding the train through the Canadian Rockies, I asked him to reflect on giving. While he had practiced giving all his life, I had never seen anything in writing. Dad talked it out with me while I scribbled some notes. Roy quotes John Chrysostom in his…
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The Faith of Nebuchadnezzar
Last week we looked at some of the common themes in Jewish humor – especially the theme of irony and outwitting the oppressors. There is a German phrase for what we sometimes feel when we read the stories of what happens to those who made life difficult and even life-threatening for Daniel and his friends. It is “schadenfreude” or rejoicing over the misfortunes of others – especially those we despise. “They got what was coming to them” is how we put it because most of us believe or hope that is how the world works. People eventually get what is coming to them and there is always a certain amount…
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A Funny Thing Happened
My father was a humorist. That is different from being a joker. Mark Twain was a humorist. A humorist can, and often does, tell jokes but that is not their stock and trade. A humorist is one who uses humor not for immediate laughs but is an artist with words, character development, timing, pauses, and the nuances of telling a story. A joke is hit and run. The whole point of a joke is to get a laugh and then move on to the next joke. That is the job of a comedian – but not a humorist. The joke is to humor what the microwave is to gourmet. It…
