JR.'s Sermons

How can we learn to see the patterns of sinfulness in our families? My mom joins me (how appropriate is that, you guys?!) to talk about family systems therapy. We also discuss how churches can support healthy and healing families.

What does it look like when God gets angry at us? Lamentations illustrates that God's anger is God giving us what we want - life apart from God. How can we learn to see God's anger as an aspect of God's love - and an invitation to life?

Dr. Sandra Glahn of Dallas Theological Seminary and I compare two queens of Israel: Jezebel and Bathsheba. Why do we sexualize, then demonize powerful women? And what is at stake when we do? Dr. Glahn speaks from her new book Vindicating the Vixens.

Everyone is busy. Everyone's looking for balance. But maybe balance is the wrong goal. Fellow author and pastor Joshua Ryan Butler joins me to share how he helps people discover their vocation - and how that changes everything.

What does it mean to be holy? How can a discussion of holiness move beyond legalistic do's and don'ts? Pastor and author Tara Beth Leach joins me to reframe holiness as self-giving love. Plus: what a holy community looks like in terms of politics and gender relationships.

In Cain's chapter, I explore how often our anger is unrighteous - covering up fear or insecurity. But what about when it's righteous? Becky Brown shares from her years of counseling experience what we can do with righteous anger.

Grief is uncomfortable. In the face of tragedy, no words are sufficient to salve our pain. Yet in the face of others’ pain, we find ourselves offering platitudes and speaking for God so we can avoid their pain. But Lamentations 1 is a funeral dirge. We hear the woman’s honest, unflinching cries of pain and see the prophet join her, offering nothing but his presence. How can we learn to be honest about pain so we can begin the process of reorientation?

We avoid pain and grief as much as possible. When faced with someone else's grief, we avoid or offer platitudes. But the book of Lamentations invites us to sit with grief, to enter into the prophetic process of Lament. In this series, we'll explore how to grieve and how to be a friend to the grieving. Ultimately, we'll see how the process of lament invites us to be agents of healing in the larger world.

We struggle to offer grace to people we feel don’t deserve it – which is, ironically, exactly who needs grace. Uncovering the true biblical origins of Satan helps us come face to face with this graceless impulse. It turns out, refusing to extend grace to others is what makes us truly Satanic. How can we choose to be a grace-filled people?

We tend to end up in echo chambers, surrounded by people who look and think a lot like us. The danger of this is that we don’t learn how to be challenged. The spiritual consequence is that we end up missing God – imagining God in our own image rather than learning to let God challenge us. Judas illustrates the reason we need to learn to be vulnerable, to open ourselves to strange friendships.