Good versus evil. Light versus darkness. We know the basic idea of this historical battle, but perhaps our mental image falls short of reality. Maybe we don’t quite grasp how radically different God is to what we might expect. God is God and there is no other. Absolutely. This is no eternal tussle between equal | Read More…
Everyone likes a shortcut. Less travel, less time, less effort. But not every shortcut is a good shortcut. In fact, there is a very popular shortcut that fails in two ways: it does not take you where you want to go, and it does take you somewhere you don’t want to be. A shortcut to | Read More…
Thank you for praying for the reunion which we mentioned last time. We had a very special weekend with participants from team 2011 and team 2012 joining this year’s team. We were even joined by George Verwer for a session on the Saturday where he shared his heart with us. We have just returned from | Read More…
“For example.” This is one of those phrases that tends to get listeners leaning in during a sermon. People want to know “what it looks like” to apply the Bible to their lives. Consequently we tend to offer examples to copy. Sometimes the person is not identified, sometimes it is someone famous, other times someone | Read More…
For four years of my life I would drive home by going west on I-84 into Portland and then out the other side on Hwy 26. I’d follow the sweep around from 82nd Avenue and pull onto the Interstate for just the last few miles into town. Every day I would have no choice but | Read More…
This may not be true in your Christian circles, but I tend to hear about popcorn. Perhaps it reveals a suppressed hankering from those who miss going to the cinema because they have overloaded the schedule with church activities. But what does popcorn have to do with Christianity? Is this a critique of junk food | Read More…
It has been a great start to the new year at Cor Deo. We had a full group of great folks for the January Intensive, then the full-time team came together the next week, and the Searights arrived to work with us a few days later. Now we are already a quarter of the way | Read More…
Last week in Cor Deo we were looking at John 6. It is one of Jesus’ great moments. In a rare glimpse of ministry up north (rare for John), Jesus has impressed the crowds with a mighty Moses-like miracle. Unlike the tension he faces down south in Judea, Jesus is a bit of star in | Read More…
This weekend my wife and I finally got to the cinema to see Les Miserables. Absolutely fantastic! Victor Hugo’s epic story of Jean Valjean and his pursuer, officer Javert, is an impressive movie adaptation of the stage musical (which we also want to see again). Jailed for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his | Read More…
One of the challenges we have in reading the Bible in English is that we tend to read everything individualistically. In reality a lot of the content of Scripture is written to a corporate “you,” which means our “me-only” mindset can easily misread what was written. At the start of Paul’s second epistle to the | Read More…
