From The Back Porch

Jesus concludes His comparison of treasures in heaven and treasures on earth with a simple statement – you cannot serve God and wealth. He then goes on to challenge the pursuit of wealth by saying, “Do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” (Matthew 6:25) Interestingly, the life Jesus is speaking of is not the day-to-day life which would have been

Jesus concludes His comparison of treasures in heaven and treasures on earth with a simple statement – you cannot serve God and wealth. He then goes on to challenge the pursuit of wealth by saying, “Do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” (Matthew 6:25) Interestingly, the life Jesus is speaking of is not the day-to-day life which would have been

Pip: From The Back Porch, where the Sermon on the Mount gets a hub-and-spoke diagram and a three-times-a-day prescription — welcome back. Mara: Today Bob takes us deep into the Lord’s Prayer — what it actually is, where it sits in the Sermon on the Mount, and why the early church treated it as a daily discipline rather than a ceremonial recitation. Pip: Let’s start with the prayer itself and what it was always meant to be. The Lord’s Prayer as a Daily Framework Mara: The post opens with a pl

Halfway through His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus seizes the teachable moment to instruct his followers about prayer and how to pray. What follows is what has become one of most recognizable passages of scripture in all of Christendom – The Lord’s Prayer. For this study we use the term “Model Prayer” since Jesus seems to offer it as a “model prayer” in Matthew 6:7-9. There He gives a warning about repetitious prayers and then says, “Pray in this manner.” The Model Prayer is not only in the middle o

What must a nation do to regain God’s favor. That’s no a bad question for Americans to answer today, but it was also a good question for the Nation of Israel to be asking in the time of Jesus. In fact, the sages spent a great deal of time pondering this question as we note from the Jerusalem Talmud. There, in Ta’anit 2:1, we read, “Rabbi Eleazar said: Three things annul [or mitigate] a harsh decree, and they are: Prayer (Tefillah), Charity/Almsgiving (Tzedakah), and Repentance (Teshuvah).” Jesus

What must a nation do to regain God’s favor. That’s no a bad question for Americans to answer today, but it was also a good question for the Nation of Israel to be asking in the time of Jesus. In fact, the sages spent a great deal of time pondering this question as we note from the Jerusalem Talmud. There, in Ta’anit 2:1, we read, “Rabbi Eleazar said: Three things annul [or mitigate] a harsh decree, and they are: Prayer (Tefillah), Charity/Almsgiving (Tzedakah), and Repentance (Teshuvah).” Jesus