Online Services

Red fish, Blue fish, Go fish for true fish, who are um, people. Seriously, how does the church present the gospel in a polarized culture? Is there anything beyond life in two colors? Join me for a few minutes with Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and his Palm Sunday entrance.

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Music Today: 'The Day that I Found God,' Switchfoot
Jon Foreman continues to write thoughtful, challenging lyrics, and this song brings another angle to the joy and surprise that come in a relationship with God through Christ.

'This noose ain't getting any looser
I get so fearful bout the future
I hear the shame of my accuser
But that ain't you
And I found strength but it wasn't what I thought
And I found peace in the places I forgot
And I found riches ain't the things that I had bought
Yeah I found out the day I lost myself was the day that I found God'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfNQNC1aKiw...

'There Is a Mountain', Caroline Cobb
C.S. Lewis said a powerful sign of the truth of Christianity is that no one would or even could create a religion based on a God like this. Here's a beautiful picture of how God turns power on its head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR2THytiZUs

Maurice Sendak in Hebrew doesn't make much sense to an English-speaking child. Is our articulation of the gospel heard in the same way in 2021? A little longer today, but join me with 1 Peter 3:15-17 and my new series on Christ and culture.

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Music today: 'His Truth is Marching On,' Michael Doughty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViDCenk4OA4

Here's an example of verbalizing Christ's Lordship in a musical frame of reference that may be more understandable to someone not all that familiar with the faith. 'Let me know Your enormity and my finiteness. . . ' Doughty was an indie music darling as the lead singer for Soul Coughing for a number of years.

'Sunshine,' Todd Snider

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0Ssjspo5q0

Snider is a songwriter who's wrapped a little differently, to put it mildly. The narrator here is perched on the ledge of a skyscraper wondering about the point of it all. I don't necessarily agree with all the theology here, but joy discovered in the last place you'd expect sounds a lot like Jesus to me.

Bonus - I came across this article today which does a great job of showing Christianity as simultaneously attractive and offensive. 'Do you really want to be countercultural? Then don't abandon Christianity. Stick with it.'

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/.../deconversion-not.../