Good Faith Reads

Welcome to Volume 2 of a 5-volume collection of devotional thoughts from the Old Testament. Morning Conversations on The Rise and Fall of Kings and Kingdoms takes the reader through nine books of biblical history. Once again, I invite you to join with me in a fresh devotional read through the pages of the Old Testament text. My goal in writing is not to exhaustively interpret, translate, or provide full commentary on every chapter of the Old Testament, but to help you engage with the text and perhaps draw some meaningful application for each day. I have discovered a number of fascinating ways the truth of God’s Word leaps off the page and into my heart. It is my hope that some of my reflections will help you with your discovery of scripture and the role of faith in your life. I use the word “Conversations” with great intentionality. I think Bible study should happen that way. God is revealed to us through God’s story, and then we reflect and offer back to God the thoughts of our hearts. It is a conversation… a back-and-forth dialogue. Conversations invite us to ponder, reflect, inquire, learn, and grow.

As you read through these volumes, my hope is that you will take the time, not to simply read what I have written, but to reflect with me on what the ancients have written. Let me challenge you each morning to take a moment to read the suggested focus chapter from a trusted translation before you dive into the words I have written. Read and reflect. As you make your way through this book, and the other volumes in the set, you will discover a lot of my life story written into these pages. But more importantly, I hope you will discover a lot about God’s story... the one carefully crafted and preserved for you. For in hearing God’s story, you will hear the echoing refrain of God’s desire to know you, to love you, and to redeem you. Welcome to the conversation.

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Twelve years ago, Larry began a project of putting together excerpts from Samuel H. Miller's first three books—The Life of the Soul (1951), The Life of the Church (1953), and The Great Realities (1955)—that he hoped would become a collection of spiritual meditations. Larry felt the need to lift nuggets out and make them available for people who had read Miller in the past and had forgotten his books. And he also felt the need to bring forth this deep, honest spirituality for those who had never heard of Samuel Miller.

Steve Nichols grew up in church and in the modern world outside of church. By his late teens, he was trying to integrate his religious and secular lives into a unified whole. How would he fashion a worldview consistent with his religious heritage and modern science? And how would he recognize God’s Presence in his everyday secular life?

Some people adopt a religious position that they defend against all secular input. Other people do the opposite, casting their lot with the secular against everything religious. Raised on both sides of the cultural division into secular and sacred, Nichols internalized both, and chose the difficult path of reconciliation.

In these pages, Nichols presents the story of his faith, and faith rediscovered, in the hope that it will provide encouragement to others.

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People of faith sometimes hesitate at the suggestion that they are by definition “theologians.” The word tends to conjure up an image of an ordained church leader or an academic professional with formal training in the field. And, to be sure, such persons have carried the discipline of theology in a formal way through the generations, providing a structure and basis for the church’s understanding of its faith.

Also, the accumulated work of formal theologians is massive to the point of being overwhelming to many people who attempt to delve into it. Its complexity can easily dissuade those with casual interest and even those required to study it.

But there is another level of theological thinking that goes on in the life and mind of every adherent to a faith. It usually does not lead to formal expression in a systematic way, but it becomes the working understanding of what one’s faith means and how it is lived in real time. It is to this kind of theological thinking and to those who engage in it that the author offers this “set of keys.”

These basic suggestions do not delve into the depths of the doctrines of the church or explore the nuances that have accompanied the Christian tradition. There are resources aplenty for anyone who wishes to explore those avenues and their many-faceted interpretations of the faith experience. This set of keys is more basic, but no less important. They provide helpful access to the rooms of theology and a perspective for dealing with what is found there, so that the encounters can be a healthy and wholesome part of the faith journey.

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The Gospels are magnificent, classic, world-shaping, reverent sketches of Jesus of Nazareth, who, to his followers, became the Christ. The Gospels have many tantalizing gaps in the story of the Jesus who lived, walked, and loved among family members, Galilean friends, and tyrannical religious and political systems. The Gospels are essentially memories of memories of a cadre of devoted followers of Jesus. That said, the four Gospels are all we have of the telling of the Jesus of Nazareth story from about 4 BCE to about 30 CE.

Through careful, reverent, well-researched twenty-first-century flights of informed imagination, Maddox aims to fill in some of the historical blanks in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, this unique person, in the words of John Shelby Spong, “full of God.”

Volume one imagines the Αρχή (beginning) of Jesus of Nazareth. Volume two trumpets the call of Jesus to serve his beloved kingdom of weeds. As the late Marcus Borg had a way of saying, “It may not have happened exactly this way, but it’s true anyway.” Meet Jesus again for the first time as he grew and served among God’s beloved “weeds” in his own time.

This is the first of a three-part series. Book Two: The Kingdom of Weeds is available here. Book three has not yet been published.

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