Are We Being Honest About Temptation?

When I moved to Sacramento, I started attending a new church. One Sunday, the pastor was talking about sin and our lives before Jesus. He surprised me when he said, “If you weren’t having fun, you were doing it wrong.” I remember thinking, “I must have been doing it wrong.” My life before Jesus had been full of anxiety, depression, and dread, with happiness occasionally stopping by to rub salt into the wounds.

I still remember this line from a poem I wrote back in 1998:

Happiness, thou art as elusive as effervescent winds to my grasping hands.

I had been depressed since childhood and often thought of ending it all. While therapists and the like might ask, “How often do you have suicidal thoughts?” a better question for me would have been, “How often do you not have suicidal thoughts?”

When God Heals You, Do You Have to Go Back to Work?

After I first became a Christian, I went from being the guy counting the seconds until the sermon was done to the guy eagerly listening to every word. There’s one sermon I remember about Mark that stayed with me, and I still think about it. It was based on Mark 1:29-31.

As soon as they left the synagogue, they went with James and John to the home of Simon and Andrew. Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they immediately told Jesus about her. So he went to her, took her hand and helped her up. The fever left her and she began to wait on them.

Mark 1:29-31 (NIV)

Imagine you’re sick and call off work, school, church, or whatever. However, you also pray, and after praying, you’re healed. What do you do? If you’re like me, you praise the Lord and enjoy the rest of the day, returning to your obligations tomorrow.

In that sermon, the pastor said we shouldn’t do that. Instead, we should be like Simon’s mother-in-law, returning to our obligations because the Lord has healed us. That wasn’t all. The pastor suggested that we were sinning and taking advantage of God’s healing if we stayed home and rested.

Is that true? Should we skip the rest because we’ve been healed?

What Was Jesus Waiting For?

Many wonder why Jesus didn’t begin His public ministry earlier. Luke tells us Jesus “was about thirty years old when he began his ministry” (Luke 3:23, NIV). I noticed something in Mark today that suggests why Jesus began His public ministry when He did:

After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.

Mark 1:14 (NIV)

I think Jesus couldn’t really ramp up His public ministry until John had “completed” his ministry.

Blasphemous buzz

around town,
burning bushes
preaching
words
of
wisdom,
death
and
destruction,
heartache
and
woe,
judgments
to come…