Pastor Prince

We're material beings by nature.  That's a constant of human history.  Seems we can never get enough stuff.  No matter how much we make, we think if we made just a little bit more, we would be happy! But in Matthew 6:19-24, Jesus comes along and tells us not to accumulate wealth on earth, where we can lose it.  Instead, we should bank wealth in heaven, where we can't lose it. Makes sense, given that eternity is so long and life here on earth is so short.  But life here on earth is now and visible, and life in eternity is in the future and invisible! When we follow Christ, we enter God's eternal kingdom, and start living by its values.  The values of the kingdom are the opposite of those of the here and now.  The here and now evaluates people by how many material things they accumulate.  The kingdom evaluates them by how much they give away!  The list goes on! How do we accumulate heavenly treasure?  Jesus doesn't say...

I hope you've been watching Ken Burns' documentary on country music.  Especially compelling to me was a segment on how difficult life was, even in the early decades of the 20th century.  One of the tributary streams of country music was church and gospel music.  For many people, their only hope the life to come.  Plus, contact with death was much more intimate.   One of the early country hits was "Can the Circle Be Unbroken" by the Carter Family.  (Yes, I know we know it as "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," but "Can" was the original!)  The song is a lament about the passing of a person's mother, the dearest person in her life.  The grief of the song is deep, but the hope is high.  The chorus says: Can the circle be unbroken, By and by, Lord, by and by. There's a better home a-waitin' In the sky, Lord, in the sky! The people in Bible times had even tougher challenges.  In addition to the harshness of life, they also ...

If you've ever been to court, you know that it can be an awesome experience.  The judge wears a black robe and sits above everyone else.  You feel the weight of his or her authority and the law.  Even if you're just an observer, you're impressed! The scriptures speak of a court experience we have ahead of us: the last judgment.  That's when we stand before God and give account for how we've lived! The last judgment is so awesome and personal that the scriptures use various pictures to describe it.  In Matthew 25, Jesus said it's like virgins keeping their oil ready for the bridegroom's return, like a master who settled accounts with his servants, and like a shepherd who separates his sheep from his goats at night. The apostle Paul said it was like an appearance before a high government official (2 Corinthians 5).  He also says it will be like fire applied to a house (1 Corinthians 3). The last picture in the scriptures is the great white throne...

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 ...