We take a brief detour into the Luke reading this week and find Jesus encouraging us to bring our experiences of injustice, our frustration, our pain to God in prayer. We are invited and instructed to assault God with our prayers. Will we do so? Or will we lose faith?
In our second stop in 2 Timothy, we find a call to, “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendent of David.” We look at what it means to remember, and to remember this, specifically.
As we begin our tour of 2 Timothy, we take a hard look at shame. As Paul tells Timothy not to be ashamed of Christ or of Paul’s chains, we find that these are important words in an honor-shame culture, and important words in our culture, still filled with honor and shame.
As we continue to wrestle with the way 1 Timothy calls for the maintenance of the culturally expected social hierarchy of its context, we find that God is inviting us into the fullness of life that is possible when we are content and godly, and urging us to avoid being distracted from the gospel by…
What do we do with passages in scripture that we don’t like? We enter into the text as foreigners in a new land, trying to learn and explore that which we do not understand. We thank God for the opportunity to learn, to be challenged, and to grow.
We look at the remarkable story behind Paul’s letter to Philemon (and his church). We find in it a radical call to trust the work of the Spirit in the church.
We finish up our stint in Hebrews by looking at what it means to live a life that is shaped like Jesus, both as a church and as individual members of the body of Christ.
We shift, with Hebrews, from faith to holiness. Coming to recognize that Christ is the perfecter of our life and faith, we discuss our call to respond to the sanctifying work of Christ by allowing ourselves to be made holy.
We continue to talk about faith, remembering that the faith we have (however big or small) is no different than the faith of those who have come before. So we run the race with perseverance (not necessarily speed), allowing that bit of faith we have to drive us forward.