Pastor Prince

What motivates our greatest generosity?  Guilt?  Duty?  Need?  In John 12:1-6, we find that the motivation for the most profound generosity is love. It was the Saturday before the Friday on which Jesus was crucified.  Jesus' friends Martha, Mary, and Lazarus were having a dinner in Jesus' honor.  Jesus recently raised Lazarus from the dead.  It must have been a joyous celebration, though Jesus knew the time of his passion was near. When they ate in those days, they didn't sit in chairs.  Instead, they reclined on pillows or couches around low tables.  Their heads were at the table, while their feet were away from it.  Martha was serving the meal.  Lazarus was at the table with everyone else. While dinner was going on, Mary entered the room, carrying an alabaster jar.  She went to Jesus' feet, broke open the jar, and poured its contents on Jesus' feet.  The smell of fragrant perfume filled the room where th...

The Bible's Big Story about God's mission to save the world comes to a climax in the last 3 chapters of the book of Revelation.  At the end of chapter 20, God resurrects the dead, and they stand in judgment before him as he sits on the great white throne.  He has great books opened, which record the deeds of each person.  But the final determination of judgment is whether the person's name is recorded in the book of life.  The book of life contains the names of those who've followed Christ. At the beginning of chapter 20, God resurrects creation, which has been subject to decay because of human sin.  Then he sends down the New Jerusalem, the eternal home of his resurrected people.  This city comes down to earth, where his people will live.  God is present in this city, so no temple is needed.  The divine and human realms come together. God declares that a new time has come, in which he will wipe every tear from every eye, and there ...

How do we gain a right relationship with God?  This is a fundamental religious question.  In Acts 15, we find the early church wrestling with it. The debate started in the church in Antioch.  Paul and Barnabas were working there and the church was growing rapidly.  Gentiles were entering the church through faith in Christ.  God had already shown that he accepted Gentiles as they were, and that they didn't need to become Jews in order to be saved (see Acts10:1ff).  Yet a group of Jewish Christ followers from Jerusalem arrived in Antioch and began to teach the Gentiles that they needed to be circumcised and follow the Old Testament law to be saved. This discouraged and confused the new Christ followers in the church.  Paul and Barnabas promptly travelled to Jerusalem to consult with the apostles and elders to get clarity on the situation.  When they arrived in the city, they shared with church leaders what God was doing in Antioch and e...

What do you do when God does something completely unexpected and wonderful?  In the story of the apostle Peter's vision at Joppa, God did something like that. The story starts at the beginning of Acts 10.  A God-fearing Roman Centurion living in Caesarea named Cornelius has a vision of a an angel.  The angel tells him to send to Joppa for a man called Peter, who's staying at the house of Simon the tanner.  Cornelius immediately dispatched two servants and one of his aides to go to Joppa. The following day, around noon, the three men are nearing Joppa.  While people are preparing the big meal of the day, Peter goes up on the roof to pray.  Though he's hungry, he falls into a trance.  In the trance, he has a vision of a large sheet coming down from heaven.  In the sheet are all kinds of unclean animals, animals the Jewish law said Peter should never eat.  A voice called out, "Arise, Peter, kill and eat." Peter recoiled at the c...

In the ancient world, life was bookended by breath.  They believed life began when babies were born and took in their first breath.  Life ended when a person made their last, long, exhale. In Genesis 2, Adam becomes a living being when God breathes into his lifeless body.   Acts 2 describes the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  It was like the birth of the church.  Jesus had commanded his followers to remain in Jerusalem to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit.  He told them that when the Spirit came, they would be his witnesses to the world. It begins with the sound of a rushing wind.  In Greek, the word used here for "wind," also means "spirit," and "breath."  The terms were closely linked in ancient minds.  What happens here blends them all.   Following the wind, they saw what appeared to be tongues of fire that fell on each of Jesus' followers. The fact that they looked like tongues suggest they were r...

Matthew 28:16ff says that after Jesus' resurrection, the eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus told them to go.  When they went there, he appeared to them and gave them a commission.  They were to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to obey everything he had commanded them.   One verb in his commission is in the imperative tense, which was like putting it in bold face.  It was "make disciples."  A disciple is a person who comes under the discipline of a master.  In Jesus' time, people learned by attaching themselves to a teacher.  They spent their days with him, following him around and learning from him.  Their goal was to think, speak, and act like their masters.   Jesus' disciples were to be disciple makers themselves.  This disciple-making process had two components: baptism and teaching.  They were baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Sp...

The climax of the Big Story of the Bible is Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection.  It's easy to think of these as two distinct events, but they're two parts of one event.  In it, God provided for the redemption of humanity. "Woman, why are you crying?" is the question highlighted in John's account of the resurrection (20:1-18).  Mary Magdalene went to Jesus' tomb early on Sunday morning, and found the stone rolled away.  Assuming Jesus' body had been stolen, she ran to Peter and John, and told them what she had seen. They ran to the tomb.  John arrived first, but waited outside the entrance.  Peter, true to his impulsive nature, strode right in the tomb when he arrived.  John followed him. As Peter looked around, he saw Jesus' burial clothes neatly arranged.  That seemed to rule out grave robbers, because they wouldn't have left them that way.  John looked around and believed .  The account doesn't say what he believed, bu...