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Sermon Shout Out from Scot McKnight: The Recipe for Peace
I hate Palm-Passion Sunday sermons. Hate. Them. I know most everyone will never come to Holy Thursday or Good Friday so I feel this pressure to condense a week’s worth of holy week time and what is an...
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Vampire Christians: Q/A on the Cross
This weekend for my sermon I answered questions people submitted about the Cross, the Atonement and the Passion Story. I pulled the questions at random from a bingo tumbler and answered as many as...
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How Does Jesus Save Us: Christus Victor
Patristic theologians, those theologians in the Church’s first generations, understood the work of atonement primarily in battle imagery. For them, the Son’s work is a dramatic struggle Jesus...
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How Does Jesus Save Us: Satisfaction
The Satisfaction or Substitutionary theory of the atonement is what many Christians take to be the only understanding. It’s the perspective you hear before altar calls or read in religious tracts. This...
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Jesus the Disappointing Messiah
Pharoah and his army he cast into the sea, they went down, down, down like a stone. By your right hand, by your mighty right hand they were shattered; Lord, you shattered them all. Sing to the Lord;...
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Jesus’ Mandate
Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He had no form or majesty. Nowhere did we see that we should desire him; He was despised and rejected by others....
View ArticleDid Christ Labor in Vain?
The Lord says it is too light a thing that you should be my servant. You will be a light to the nations that my salvation may reach to the end, reach to the end, reach to the end of the earth. I...
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Sorry, Jesus. They Knew What They Were Doing
Forgive them- that sounds like Jesus, alright. But: ʻThey donʼt know what theyʼre doing?ʼ Really? Itʼs not like Jesus to get something so wrong. Maybe it would help it all go down a bit easier. Maybe...
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Sermon Shout Out from Scot McKnight: Which ‘Son of the Father’ Would You Choose?
- Matthew 27.15-26 If I could offer you a choice: between a savior who tells you to return hate with love, or a savior who gives you permission to strike back at those who do you evil- if I could give...
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Good Friday through Nicodemus’ Eyes
This Good Friday we broke the worship service and sermon into thirds with each segment narrating a piece of Nicodemus’ story as told by John. An actor in the congregation played Nicodemus, speaking the...
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How Does Jesus Save Us?
The angel Gabriel in Matthew’s Gospel tells the sleeping Joseph to name ‘his’ boy ‘Jesus’ for that boy will ‘save’ his people from their sin. This is as explicit as the nativity story gets. How Jesus...
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Did God Punk His Only Begotten Son?
This weekend is Palm-Passion Sunday, the start of Holy Week and the day that begins with glad shouts of Hosanna and ends at Golgotha. This time of year the cross necessarily begs the questions: ‘Why...
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When Were You Saved?
A couple years ago I was the guest preacher at an evangelical church in Northern Virginia. I arrived early to get a sense of the sanctuary and the congregation’s expectations. Before the service...
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Are the Gospels Just Filler?
This weekend is Palm-Passion Sunday and, with it, the beginning of Holy Week. We’re following Jesus to the Cross. The following is an anecdote I used to begin a sermon on the atonement a few years ago:...
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What are Your Questions about the Cross?
There’s a sense in which the Gospels are extended Passion stories. That’s certainly true of Mark and John’s Gospels. And yet for all the attention given to the cross, the Gospel writers do not make...
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God Made Jesus Sin?
Holy Week is coming up next week and this Sunday is Palm/Passion Sunday; consequently, I’ve got the atonement running through my head. The atonement is the theological term for thinking through how...
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