As with all of these type of resources, discretion must be exercised, but I have found some useful ideas on all of the following:
Sermons for Kids
Kids Sunday School
Whiter than Snow
(click to enlarge the cartoon)
Revelation 7:13-14
13Then one of the elders asked me, “These in white robes—who are they, and where did they come from?”
14I answered, “Sir, you know.”
And he said, “These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
Filed under Revelation
Making fun of Jesus?
Interesting piece of commentary from a non-Christian guy who’s normally all about pointing out stuff about men in society in a fun way. Linking to a YouTube clip of a person dressed as Jesus singing ‘I will survive’ (which, ironically, is the message of Jesus in Revelation: ‘I have overcome, I have survived, so you do the same’), he comments:
The following clip may offend if you’re a God-fearing Christian, so I’ll be interested to see if I receive any death threats from fundamentalist Catholics as a result of this post. My bold prediction? I’ll get absolutely none.
My point? Imagine if this bloke had dressed up like the prophet Mohammed instead of taking the piss out of Jesus? He’d be shivering in a cave somewhere in Montana while firemen picked through the charred remains of his torched Los Angeles apartment.
I know I’m going to hell anyway, but the fact I can even write the sentence “taking the piss out of Jesus” – let alone post this clip – without fearing for my life shows most Christians are pretty easy-going types.And I guess that’s where “the West” struggles to comes to terms with the “Islamic world”. Above all else, it just seems so rigid and stern.
I’m worried even pointing it out …
This guy’s on to something. Christians don’t react the same way. And its because of the fundamentally different nature of the ‘Lord’ that Christians follow.
Jesus overcomes, not by being afraid of being insulted, but by facing insults and persecutions and flogging and wrongful crucifixion head on, and defeating it 3 days later in his resurrection from the dead. He is now the powerful one who reigns over all, and who waits for the day when he will put all things to right.
Church Sign
Filed under signs
Treasure in Heaven?
Just recently, someone aksed me what I thought ‘treasure in heaven’ was. Here’s what I answered:
After 3 or so months of ruminating (ok, just doing other stuff!), I’m ready to give this a bit of a go.
You said:
The idea of treasure still seems a little mercenary: I’m not doing it for Jesus
so much as for the heavenly goodies I’ll get.
I think there may be a false dichotomy in that statement. That is, the heavenly goodies we get is Jesus. Complete fellowship with him. In his presence to magnify his name forever.
The danger with the ‘duty’ perspective that you mentioned is that we think we ‘owe’ God. Its a view that goes something like: ‘Well, God has done so much for me in sending Jesus, that I owe him my life and my service and my good deeds in his name. Its the least I can do.’
The problem with this is it slips into a bit of a ‘merit’ theology. But can we ever really repay God for what he has done? The reality is, that any good works we do for him are ‘prepared in advance for us to do’ by him, and then enabled by him in us to do anyway. He is the one who energises us, who gives us his Spirit-gifts to serve, and gives us the context in which to use them. Consider these two quotes from John Piper:
Every good deed we do in dependence on God does just the opposite of paying him back; it puts us ever deeper in his debt to His grace. And that is exactly where God wants us to be through all eternity.
Good deeds do not pay back grace; they borrow more grace.
Which sort of leads to your second question:
What’s your take Keith: what is treasure in heaven? A room with a river-of-life
view? A seat closer to Jesus?
Here’s my take at the moment. The picture in heaven is of the saints in adoring praise of God and the lamb who was slain. That is the greatest good that anyone can have, and everyone partakes in it. So what then could further ‘treasure’ be? What could give someone a greater experience of that ultimate reality?
I suspect treasure is heaven is a deeper understanding of the grace of God in the gospel. Whether that is in the shape of seeing people that God was pleased to save through your faithful witness, or seeing those who benefited from your faithful and gracious exercise of the gifts God had given you, or whatever. The motivation for service then is not mercenary, for it is out of a desire to have a more complete worship of God who should be the sole object of worship.
Filed under heaven
Bauckham on Understanding Revelation as Prophecy for Today
“Biblical prophecy always both addressed the prophet’s contemporaries about their own present and the future immediately impending for them and raised hopes which proved able to transcend their immediate relevance to the prophets contemporaries and continue to direct later readers to God’s purpose for their future.
Historicizing modern scholarship has sometimes stressed the former to the total exclusion of the latter, forgetting that most biblical prophecy was only preserved in the canon of Scripture because its relevance was not exhausted by its reference to its original context.
Conversely, fundamentalist interpretation, which finds in biblical prophecy coded predictions of specific events many centuries later than the prophet, misunderstands prophecy’s continuing relevance by neglecting to ask what it meant to its first hearers.
It is important … to understand how John’s prophecy addressed his contemporaries, since they are the only readers it explicitly addresses. This does not prevent us from appreciating but helps us to understand how it may also transcend its original context and speak to us.”
R.Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), 152-3.
Filed under Revelation
Carson audio link
I’m a big fan of Don Carson from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the US. I heard him recently at the preaching conference I attended, and enjoy his scholarship and passionate delivery on ANY topic from Scripture.
In Anticipation 