Pastor Prince

Anticipation of Christ's return was a fever pitch when I was in high school!  The book The Late Great Planet Earth was published, and became an immediate bestseller.  Every evangelist who preached a revival at our church did at least one sermon on it.  One evangelist looked at me and the rest of my youth group sitting at the front and said, "I believe not one of these teenagers will have a gray hair on their head before Christ returns!" Today, my hair is pretty much all gray, so that didn't quite work out! I inhaled all the anticipation and helped spread it!  But I didn't know that every generation of Christ followers expected Christ to return in their generation, and that the view of the end times I held was only one of several possible approaches. This led me to study the scriptures to find what the Bible actually says about Christ's return and to separate it from all the well-intentioned, but fanciful and false interpretations. Passag...

  Zombies are everywhere!  In movies, video games, TV shows, and more!  Why is this? Zombies used to be live humans who were "under a spell."  But now, they're the living dead, products and residents of a post apocalyptic world.  They're usually created by some sort of global catastrophe, like a nuclear war, a deadly disease outbreak, or a scientific experiment gone wrong! Before World War I, people were basically optimistic about the future.  They thought humanity was on a steady upward climb, and life was going to get better and better.  But after two world wars, our outlook changed.  Add to those wars the nuclear bomb, and things look bleak.  For the first time in our history, it was possible for us to destroy ourselves. Zombies represent our attempt to deal with global destruction and death. The Bible has nothing good to say about death.  Even Jesus anguished over it in the Garden of Gethsemane.  In 1 Cor....

"Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44) may be the most difficult of all Jesus' commands!  It calls us to do something unnatural, something that in some ways seems unjust.   Its radical nature is one reason why some teachers have said that Jesus' Sermon on the Mount was intended for the time in the future when Jesus reigns on earth!  Who can follow such difficult commands? But Jesus showed us it could be done by his own life, as he loved everyone.  He spoke harsh words about the leaders of his people, but he asked God to forgive them while he hung on the cross. Jesus said we're to practice this kind of radical forgiveness so we can be sons of our Father in heaven.  In Jesus' time, people used the words "sons of" in an adjectival sense.  Instead of saying "evil men," they said "sons of evil." So to be a son of the Father is to behave like the Father.  The Father practices radical...

We're in a peculiar place in our culture in relation to marriage.  On one hand, marriages are breaking up at a high rate.  On the other, gay people are wanted to get married.   This suggests to me that God has put in us a deep desire for the sustaining good marriage brings.  At the same time, our sinful brokenness makes it difficult to sustain our marriages.   In Matthew 5:27-32, Jesus addresses the topics of adultery and divorce. He says adultery is born in our inner lusts for each other.  Adultery begins in our hearts, so it's best to "nip it in the bud" while it's there.  Entertaining lustful thoughts is a sin in itself, which can lead to the sin of acting on them. Jesus says divorce is also a sin.  God's intention was for marriage to be one man and one woman in a one flesh relationship for life (see Genesis 2:23-24).  He said that if a man divorces his wife, he causes her to commit adultery.  That's because in those ...

No human emotion is more powerful and dangerous than anger.  When I think of anger, I think of the Incredible Hulk! In the Marvel comic, Bruce Banner was a great scientist who was accidentally exposed to a massive dose of gamma rays.  The result was that whenever he gets angry, he transforms to a huge green beast in human form who proceeds to tear up everything around him. Like many comic book heroes, we can see the Hulk as a metaphor.  He's a metaphor for the potential beast in each of us. When our anger rises, we can become beasts who commit destructive acts in our rage. We find anger often in the scriptures.  In Genesis 4, Cain becomes angry at God because he didn't accept his offering.  God asks him why he's angry and warns him that sin is crouching at his door, ready to consume him.  Cain doesn't listen, and his anger leads him to commit the first murder. The Lord Jesus talked about anger in Matthew 5:21ff.  He quoted Exodus 2...

What role did Jesus want his followers to play in the world?  Matthew 5:13-16 says he wanted them to be penetrating and transforming agents for God's kingdom. In this passage, he said they were the "salt of the earth" and the "light of the world."  In Jesus' time, salt was a penetrating and purifying agent.  It penetrated food and killed the corruption in it.  That's why in the days before refrigerators people salted meats and other foods.  Light was a penetrating and revealing agent.  It penetrated the darkness and revealed what was in it.  It showed what was true. This passage appears in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7).  In this section, Jesus described the ideal attitudes and behaviors of kingdom citizens.  When you read through it, you'll find that kingdom citizens were to have unique lifestyles that went against the grain of our broken world.  As they went into the world and lived by the distinct values of the ...

After an arduous 15-month-long journey, Meriwether Lewis arrived at the headwaters of the Missouri River.  As he took a drink from the cool spring there, he thought he would climb to the top of a nearby hill and see a slope that gently descended to the Columbia River.  He thought he and his men would carry their canoes on their backs down the slope for less than a day and reach the river.  Then they would ride that river downstream to the Pacific. But when Lewis climbed that hill, he couldn't believe his eyes.  Instead of seeing the gentle slope descending to the Columbia, he saw. . .the Rocky Mountains!   In this book Canoeing the Mountains , Tod Bolsinger compares the challenge of Lewis and Clark at the Lemhi Pass to that the of church in America today.  We've gone off our map.  The landscape we're in is totally different from what we've known.  Our "canoes," our past paradigms and programs, worked great in the past.  But they...