Living life with steps of faith

This morning as I took a shower I dream about a sermon series I will do once I am the pastor of a church. It was a series that would take place in the summer and the theme would be bio-ethics. I thought about how I would start collecting information in different files for different possible sermon topics, speakers I would have come for an adult Sunday afternoon VBS, and a fun children's Sunday School/VBS curriculum that I could design. Switching between regions of the United States gives me access to whole new kind of resource. My current job has connected me with Christians who are experts in their fields and have learned how to integrate their faith with their work. There is a gift in this. But there is also a gift in my home region and that is a sense of stability and intimacy among a Christian community. In that region I imagine myself doing sermon series that go deeper into one's spiritual walk in a different way. I would still do a bioethics series, but it would probab...

For the past few weeks I've been reading through the Pentateuch. I'm excited that in the next week I'll probably finish! As I reflect on the detail to which God called the writers to record the genealogies and the details of the temple and the law, I realize that God was establishing His boundaries with the people. God was revealing Himself as awe-inspiring and worthy of respect. Imagine with me wandering in the wilderness. No, imagine with me wandering through a dessert that includes cities and interactions with other nomads. Imagine with me being 600,000 people wandering through that dessert together! What keeps you together? A promise from God? The glory of a movable temple? The miracles? The presence of God in your midst? I think that during this time God was teaching His people how to have reverence for Him. He wants His people to be set apart and holy and so He gives them laws and orders to follow, so that they might show their faithfulness through obedience and...

What if we have it all wrong! What if by making Sunday into our day of worship, we have gotten in the way of people living their lives as an act of worship? What if we truly are to rest on Sunday? What if a better form of corporate worship can be found in festivals, special services of forgiveness or prayer, and community sharing? Could we make something like this work in our culture? (Exodus 23:12, 17)