Tag Archives: Apostle Paul

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FAITH, HOPE, LOVE, Part 8: The Work of Reconciliation

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Image: AI-generated using Gemini and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “The Work of Reconciliation” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

In the 2007 film Atonement, based on Ian McEwan’s novel, a thirteen-year-old girl named Briony Tallis makes an accusation that changes several lives forever. What begins as a terrible misunderstanding becomes something far more consequential, and the damage cannot simply be undone.

Spoiler warning: The following discussion reveals the film’s central mystery and ending.

Briony witnesses interactions between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, a young man with whom Cecilia is developing a romantic relationship. Briony misunderstands what she sees, interpreting Robbie’s behavior through the imagination and assumptions of a child who believes she understands far more than she does.

Later, when her cousin Lola is sexually assaulted, Briony identifies Robbie as the attacker, despite not having clearly seen the perpetrator. Robbie is innocent. The actual attacker is Paul Marshall, a wealthy acquaintance of the family.

Briony’s accusation results in Robbie’s imprisonment and separates him from Cecilia. Years later, Robbie serves in the British military during World War II, while Cecilia has become estranged from her family.

As Briony grows older, she recognizes the enormity of what she has done. She becomes a nurse, struggles with her guilt, and eventually writes a novel attempting to confront the consequences of her accusation.

But the film’s final revelation is devastating.

The reconciliation Briony depicts between herself, Robbie, and Cecilia never happened. Robbie died during the evacuation of Dunkirk, and Cecilia was killed during the Blitz. Briony has given them, through fiction, the future they never lived.

She can rewrite their story. She cannot restore their lives.

And therein lies one of the most difficult truths about reconciliation: sometimes the damage we have done, or the damage done to us, cannot be repaired through an apology, however sincere.

The apostle Paul writes that God has reconciled us through Christ and entrusted us with the ministry of reconciliation. He declares that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone, and a new life has begun.

But notice the order of Paul’s proclamation.

God initiates. We participate.

Reconciliation begins not with our ability to repair everything we have broken, but with God’s grace reaching into a world already fractured by sin, injustice, estrangement, and suffering.

Paul goes even further. God was reconciling the world through Christ, no longer counting people’s sins against them.

The world. Not merely those who have successfully repaired every relationship, made every apology, or satisfied every religious expectation.

That does not mean wrongdoing becomes inconsequential. Nor does it mean that forgiveness eliminates accountability. If anything, becoming a new creation demands that we confront the truth about ourselves, including the harm we have caused.

Jesus tells his followers that if they remember someone has something against them, they should seek reconciliation before returning to worship. There is urgency in that command. We cannot claim devotion to God while treating the wounds we have inflicted upon others as unimportant.

Yet we must be careful not to turn that command into another means of causing harm.

Sometimes someone genuinely repents, but the person they harmed refuses reconciliation. Sometimes the person responsible for the injury refuses accountability, continues harmful behavior, or has died. And sometimes a person has truly changed, but attempting contact would reopen wounds and inflict further suffering upon the one they injured.

In such circumstances, reconciliation cannot responsibly mean forcing an encounter, demanding forgiveness, or insisting that a relationship be restored.

A sincere apology does not grant us the right to enter someone else’s life again.

Likewise, forgiveness does not obligate someone to return to an unsafe relationship. The church has sometimes confused reconciliation with restoration at any cost, pressuring wounded people to make peace while allowing those responsible for their suffering to avoid the discomfort of accountability.

That is not the ministry of reconciliation Paul describes.

Our calling is to participate faithfully in God’s transforming work, not to control its outcome.

And what happens when reconciliation with another person is impossible?

Perhaps this is where we must consider reconciliation within ourselves: acknowledging what happened, accepting responsibility where responsibility belongs, releasing guilt that was never ours to carry, and allowing God’s grace to lead us toward healing.

For someone who has caused harm, that may mean living a genuinely changed life without ever receiving forgiveness from the person they injured. For someone who has suffered harm, it may mean establishing boundaries, grieving what cannot be restored, and discovering that their future need not remain captive to another person’s wrongdoing.

Neither journey requires pretending the past never happened.

Paul’s promise of new creation does not erase history. It declares that history does not possess the final word over who we may become.

Briony could not bring Robbie and Cecilia back. Her fictional ending could not accomplish what reality made impossible. But her story confronts us with a question that reaches beyond the film: What do we do when we cannot make things right?

We tell the truth. We accept responsibility. We seek repair where possible and safe. We respect the boundaries of those we have harmed. We refuse to demand that others heal according to our timetable. And we remain open to the transforming grace of God.

Because reconciliation is not ultimately our achievement.

God initiates. We participate.

And even when a broken relationship cannot be restored, God’s work of making us new can continue.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
God initiates reconciliation. We participate through truth, accountability, grace, and love, even when restoration is impossible.

PRAYER
Reconciling God, give us courage to acknowledge our wrongs, grace to respect others’ boundaries, and wisdom to accept what cannot be restored. Heal our wounds and guide us toward new life in Christ. Amen.

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FAITH, HOPE, LOVE, Part 7: The Foolishness of Power

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Read 1 Corinthians 1:18–31

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“He humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:8 NLT)

Image: AI-generated using Gemini and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “FAITH, HOPE, LOVE, Part 7: The Foolishness of Power” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

In October of 312 CE, Constantine marched toward the Milvian Bridge outside Rome, preparing to confront his rival, Maxentius. According to accounts written by Christian historians, Constantine experienced a vision or divine sign associated with Christ before the battle. The details differ between the surviving accounts, but the outcome is unmistakable: Constantine won, and the relationship between Christianity and imperial power would never be the same.

For nearly three centuries, Christians had lived under an empire that could imprison, torture, and execute them. Now, the emperor himself was embracing the Christian religion, though whether he was wholly faithful to Christ is another question. The cross, an instrument of Roman execution, was becoming associated with Roman victory.

For many Christians, this must have seemed extraordinary. Persecution was giving way to imperial favor. But not everyone welcomed the increasingly intimate relationship between church and empire. Some Christians questioned the emperor’s involvement in church affairs, while others resisted the privileges and compromises that accompanied imperial Christianity.

Looking back, we can understand why.

The danger was not simply that Christianity had gained influence. It was that the church might begin confusing the authority of Christ with the authority of Rome.

And history offers a troubling illustration of where that confusion can lead.

Centuries later, the Knights Templar emerged as a religious military order during the Crusades. These were men who professed devotion to Christ while carrying swords into battle. They took religious vows, protected pilgrims, accumulated considerable wealth, and became deeply entangled in the political and financial affairs of medieval Europe.

The cross was no longer merely a reminder of Christ’s suffering. It was displayed upon the clothing of armed warriors.

Then came Friday, October 13, 1307.

King Philip IV of France ordered the arrest of the Templars throughout his kingdom. Accused of heresy and other offenses, many were imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured. Some died in captivity or under torture, while others were executed, including dozens burned at the stake. Among those eventually executed was Jacques de Molay, the order’s last Grand Master, who was burned in Paris in March 1314. Confessions were extracted under coercion, and the order was formally suppressed in 1312.

The historical irony is brutal.

An order that had accumulated military, political, and financial influence under the banner of Christ found itself crushed by the ambitions of a king.

Power had turned upon power.

And somewhere beneath these centuries of Christian history stands the apostle Paul, insisting that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but the power of God to those being saved.

Consider how extraordinary that claim would have sounded in the first century.

Rome used crucifixion to demonstrate the consequences of defying imperial authority. The cross was designed to humiliate, terrorize, and destroy. It announced that Rome possessed the power to determine who lived and who died.

Yet Paul identifies the crucified Christ as the revelation of God’s wisdom and power.

Not because suffering is inherently holy. Not because weakness is a virtue to be imposed upon the vulnerable. And certainly not because God desires people to submit to abuse.

Rather, the cross exposes the limitations of power built upon domination.

In Philippians, Paul describes Christ as one who did not exploit divine status for personal advantage, but embraced humility and obedience, even to death upon a cross.

That does not mean authority itself is wrong.

Paul exercised apostolic authority, sometimes with considerable force. John Wesley’s charge to Methodist ministers to take authority likewise reflects an understanding that Christian leadership carries genuine responsibility.

But neither Paul nor Wesley understood faithful spiritual authority as permission to dominate.

Christian authority is entrusted for stewardship, shepherding, and guiding others toward faithfulness to Christ. It is not ownership of the people entrusted to our care.

And here is where the history becomes uncomfortably contemporary.

The church has repeatedly proclaimed the crucified Christ while seeking the very forms of worldly power that crucified him. We have used the cross to justify conquest, enforce conformity, defend institutions, uphold capital punishment, and sanctify ambitions that bear little resemblance to the self-giving love of Jesus.

We can still do so whenever we confuse protecting the faith with controlling people, defending the church with preserving privilege, or exercising authority with demanding submission.

The temptation reaches beyond emperors, kings, and religious institutions. It appears whenever we use our position, influence, knowledge, or authority to secure our own importance at someone else’s expense.

The problem is not that Christians possess power. It is that we can become so enamored with possessing it that we forget whom it is supposed to serve.

Constantine’s victory and the Templars’ downfall remind us how readily the cross can become entangled with human ambition. Paul’s proclamation confronts us with something far more difficult: a crucified Lord whose power cannot be measured by conquest, wealth, prestige, or control.

Perhaps the greatest foolishness is not believing that God’s power was revealed through a crucified man.

Perhaps it is believing that we can follow that man while making his cross serve our own ambitions.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
The cross reveals God’s power through self-giving love, not our ability to dominate others.

PRAYER
God of grace, forgive us when we confuse authority with ownership and faithfulness with control. Free us from the desire to make Christ’s cross serve our ambitions. Teach us to exercise whatever authority we have with humility, courage, and love, remembering that those entrusted to our care belong to you. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

FAITH, HOPE, LOVE, Part 6: Faith Without Permission

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Read Galatians 2:15–21

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“So we are made right with God through faith and not by obeying the law.” (Romans 3:28 NLT)

Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Faith Without Permission” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

The doorbell rings. A young woman has brought her fiancé home to meet her parents. It’s an ordinary family moment, filled with introductions, polite conversation, and the nervous anticipation that comes with meeting the person your child intends to marry. Except this is 1967. The young woman is white. Her fiancé is Black. And her parents, who have always considered themselves progressive and committed to racial equality, suddenly find their convictions sitting in their living room.

That is the tension at the heart of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The question is no longer what this family believes about equality. The question is what happens when those beliefs walk through the front door.

The film was released the same year the United States Supreme Court struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Its central conflict exposed a contradiction that remains painfully familiar: people can sincerely believe in inclusion while struggling to practice it when inclusion challenges their comfort, expectations, or social standing.

Nearly two thousand years earlier, the apostle Peter found himself confronting a remarkably similar contradiction.

In Galatians 2, Paul recounts an incident in Antioch involving Peter and the Gentile believers. Peter had been sharing meals with them, recognizing through his actions that they belonged to the same community of faith. But when certain people associated with James, Jesus’ brother, arrived, Peter withdrew from those meals because he feared the criticism of those who insisted on circumcision.

Peter knew better. He had already crossed the boundary. He had already welcomed these believers as family. Yet when the wrong people walked into the room, he began behaving as though the boundary still mattered.

Paul confronted him publicly because this was not merely an awkward social situation. Peter’s behavior threatened the very truth of the gospel.

The issue was not whether Jewish believers could continue observing their religious traditions. The issue was whether Gentile believers had to adopt those traditions to be considered fully acceptable members of Christ’s community. By withdrawing from their table, Peter was effectively communicating that their belonging was conditional.

And that is where this ancient confrontation becomes uncomfortably contemporary.

Churches regularly proclaim that everyone is welcome. We place the words on signs, print them in bulletins, and announce them from pulpits. We insist that God’s love is unconditional and that salvation comes through grace rather than human achievement.

But what happens when someone actually arrives who challenges our understanding of who belongs?

Perhaps they come from a different religious background, have a complicated personal history, live with a disability, struggle financially, or understand their identity in ways that make others uncomfortable. Perhaps they ask questions we would rather not answer or refuse to pretend that their lives fit neatly into our expectations.

We may welcome them through the doors while quietly communicating that full acceptance requires something more. They can attend, but can they participate? They can worship, but can they lead? They can sit at the table, but will we still sit beside them when someone whose approval we value enters the room?

There is a difference between welcoming people into a building and welcoming them into a community.

Paul’s argument in Galatians 2 strikes at the heart of that distinction. We are made right with God through faith in Jesus Christ, not through satisfying a religious system’s requirements. If righteousness could be obtained through the law, Paul argues, then Christ died for nothing.

This does not mean faith has no ethical demands or that Christian communities should abandon accountability. It means we must distinguish between being transformed by Christ and being required to conform to someone else’s expectations before we are treated as belonging to Christ.

The difference matters.

Peter’s failure was not that he lacked theological knowledge. He understood that Gentile believers belonged. His failure was allowing fear to determine whether he would act according to what he knew. He did not need another lesson about grace. He needed the courage to live the grace he already professed.

And perhaps that is precisely what the church needs to hear.

We can have beautifully written statements of welcome, thoughtful theology, and passionate sermons about God’s unconditional love. But if our welcome disappears whenever it becomes inconvenient, our words become little more than decoration.

Faith is not simply agreeing that Christ has broken down the barriers separating people from God. Faith means refusing to rebuild those barriers ourselves.

In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the question is whether a family’s professed convictions can withstand the arrival of someone they had never imagined welcoming so intimately. In Antioch, the question was whether Peter would continue sharing a table with people he already knew belonged.

And in the church today, the question remains.

When someone comes to the table, will we make room? Or will we look around first to see who’s watching?

Christ has already extended the invitation.

Who gave us permission to take it back?

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Faith is not proven by whom we say God welcomes, but by whom we are willing to welcome ourselves.

PRAYER
God of boundless grace, forgive us for the barriers we rebuild after Christ has torn them down. Give us the courage to live the welcome we proclaim, especially when doing so challenges our comfort or costs us the approval of others. Teach us to recognize your grace at work in people we might otherwise overlook, and make our tables places where your love is practiced rather than merely promised. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

FAITH, HOPE, LOVE, Part 5: The Merit of Grace

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Read Romans 3:21–31

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless. For if keeping the law could make us right with God, then there was no need for Christ to die. (Galatians 2:21 NLT)

Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “The Merit of Grace” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Charlie Bucket deserves the chocolate factory.

That is part of what makes Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory so satisfying. Five children receive golden tickets and enter Wonka’s strange, wonderful world, and one by one, four of them fail. Augustus cannot control his appetite. Violet refuses to listen. Veruca demands whatever she wants. Mike ignores every warning because he is convinced he knows better.

And then there is Charlie. He is poor, humble, and devoted to his family. He makes mistakes, but when the final test comes, he returns what does not belong to him. He does the right thing when there appears to be nothing left to gain from doing it. Wonka rewards him because Charlie has proven himself worthy of the factory. It is a wonderful story, and it works because we believe Charlie deserves what he receives.

It is also not grace.

We understand Wonka’s system instinctively because most of us have spent our lives inside systems of deservingness. Work hard and you deserve success. Make good choices and you deserve good consequences. Contribute enough and you deserve assistance when you need it. Follow the rules and you deserve respect. Prove yourself useful and you deserve a place at the table. We call it meritocracy, and there is something appealing about it because actions, work, and responsibility really do matter.

The problem comes when achievement becomes a measurement of human worth. Then the person who succeeds must somehow be better than the person who struggles. Poverty becomes evidence of irresponsibility. Wealth becomes evidence of virtue. Productivity becomes worthiness and need becomes failure. We begin sorting people into those who have earned what they have and those who deserve whatever happens to them.

Society does this constantly.

But so does the church.

Churches measure things: attendance, giving, baptisms, professions of faith, new members, small groups, mission participation, worship growth. We collect statistics, study trends, and talk about vitality. Some of that is necessary. Numbers can tell us things we need to know. They can expose problems we might rather ignore and help us understand whether our ministries are actually reaching people.

But measurements can quietly become merit. A growing congregation becomes a successful congregation, while a declining congregation becomes a failing one. A pastor whose numbers increase appears effective, while one whose numbers decrease becomes suspect. Churches with resources look worthy of investment while struggling churches begin to look like liabilities. Statistics that were supposed to help us understand ministry can become a scoreboard determining whose ministry matters.

We are measuring worth.

Paul tears straight through that system. In Romans 3, he asks what room remains for boasting after the grace of God revealed in Jesus Christ. His answer is none. Righteousness is not the prize at the end of a spiritual competition. Nobody reaches God’s grace by outperforming everyone else. Nobody receives the kingdom because they survived the tour while Augustus fell into the chocolate river and Veruca went down the garbage chute. We receive grace because grace is gift.

Galatians makes the point even sharper. Paul insists that if we could make ourselves right with God through our ability to satisfy the system, then Christ died for nothing. Christians can proclaim salvation by grace while constructing communities organized around merit. We can preach that nobody earns God’s love and then spend the rest of the week deciding which people, pastors, congregations, and ministries have demonstrated enough value to deserve ours.

The cross will not let us do that comfortably. Christ crucified exposes what happens when human systems decide who matters, who succeeds, who fails, and whose life is expendable. Grace announces something those systems cannot tolerate:

Your worth was never theirs to calculate.

That does not mean faithfulness does not matter. It does not mean churches should ignore decline, leaders should avoid accountability, or Christians should stop asking whether our ministries bear fruit. It means fruit is not the same thing as worth. There are faithful churches with shrinking membership. There are flourishing ministries whose impact cannot be captured on a statistical report. There are people doing holy work that will never produce impressive numbers. And there are successful institutions whose statistics look wonderful while their witness looks nothing like Christ.

Charlie Bucket deserves the factory, and that is why Wonka gives it to him. But the kingdom of God is not a chocolate factory. There are no golden tickets and no scoreboard determining who has accumulated enough merit to belong. Grace does not gather the winners at the end of the tour and congratulate them for being better than everybody who disappeared along the way.

Grace gives us what none of us could ever claim to deserve.

Maybe the question is not whether we have done enough to deserve what God gives us, but what might happen if the church finally believed that nobody had to.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Grace stops being grace the moment we turn it into something anyone must deserve.

PRAYER
God of grace, free us from the need to measure our worth against the success or failure of others. Teach us to recognize the difference between faithful accountability and systems that turn achievement into value. Strip away our boasting, widen our mercy, and shape us into people who receive your grace as gift and extend it just as freely. Amen.

[i] Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 16: Toward What Lies Ahead

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Read Philippians 3:12–14

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Meanwhile, Saul was uttering threats with every breath and was eager to kill the Lord’s followers. So he went to the high priest. He requested letters addressed to the synagogues in Damascus, asking for their cooperation in the arrest of any followers of the Way he found there. He wanted to bring them—both men and women—back to Jerusalem in chains.” (Acts 9:1–2 NLT)

Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Toward What Lies Ahead” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

I have always had an affinity for Paul.

Not the Paul polished by centuries of Christianity into a nearly untouchable saint. Nor the Paul some would rather reduce to a sinner, remembered primarily for the violence and persecution of his past. I am drawn to Paul the man—the complicated human being who somehow embodied both.

Because before Paul became one of Christianity’s most profound voices for the radical love and grace of Jesus Christ, he was Saul of Tarsus.

And Saul could be terrifying.

He was a Diaspora Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, a Pharisee, educated in Jerusalem under Gamaliel, and fiercely committed to what he believed faithfulness to God required. He also moved within the wider Greco-Roman world and possessed Roman citizenship. Paul belonged to overlapping worlds, and those worlds would later profoundly shape his ministry.

But Saul wasn’t wandering around searching for meaning or wondering what he should do with his life. He believed he already knew. He was so certain of his righteousness that he participated in the persecution of people he believed were dangerously wrong.

Acts introduces him approving of Stephen’s execution. Soon afterward, Saul is entering homes and dragging followers of Jesus away to prison. Eventually, he heads toward Damascus carrying authority to arrest followers of the Way and bring them back to Jerusalem.

Then Christ meets him on the road, and everything changes.

But Saul does not simply disappear and some pristine Saint Paul take his place.

The man who becomes one of Christianity’s most profound voices for grace remains the same man who once participated in violent religious persecution. Paul carries that history with him. He remembers it. He writes about it. He knows both the terrifying damage religious certainty can cause and the astonishing grace of discovering that even the person who caused that damage is not beyond redemption.

That is the Paul who fascinates me. Not sinner or saint, but sinner and saint—a human being capable of terrible harm and extraordinary faithfulness. A violent persecutor transformed into a passionate proponent of the very Christ—and the very people—he once persecuted.

And Paul keeps moving.

The man who once traveled from place to place trying to stop the Jesus movement eventually travels throughout the Roman world proclaiming Christ, forming communities of faith, enduring opposition, suffering beatings and imprisonment, and continuing forward anyway.

By the time Paul writes to the Philippians, there is quite a lot behind him. He is writing from prison, although scholars continue to debate exactly which imprisonment. Rome has traditionally been the leading possibility, while Caesarea and Ephesus have also been proposed. What matters for Philippians is that Paul is confined, his future uncertain, and the possibility of death very real.

If ever there were a moment to look backward and declare the journey complete, this was it.

Paul could remember Damascus, churches planted, lives changed, miles traveled, friendships formed, some other friendships ended, suffering endured, and a life radically transformed by Christ. Yet Paul says he hasn’t arrived.

Instead, he writes: “I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead…”

Paul is not telling us to erase our histories. He spends plenty of time remembering his own. In this very chapter, he recounts who he was, what he once valued, and how encountering Christ changed his understanding of it all.

Paul remembers the past. He simply refuses to live there.

The past can teach us, shape us, wound us, humble us, and remind us of God’s faithfulness. It can show us how far we have come and warn us against becoming who we once were. But yesterday cannot be the place where faithfulness happens today.

Neither can tomorrow.

That can be easy to miss when Paul speaks so passionately about pressing toward what lies ahead. We can become so fixated on the future that we treat the present as little more than a waiting room. Someday I will serve. Someday I will forgive. Someday I will speak. Someday the church will change. Someday I will finally become who God wants me to be.

But Paul is not sitting in prison waiting for someday. He is writing, encouraging, teaching, praying, witnessing, and loving people now.

That may be the paradox at the heart of moving forward with God: we reach toward what lies ahead by living faithfully in the present.

Yesterday is beyond our reach. Tomorrow has not arrived. God has given us today.

That has been the movement beneath every God beginning we have explored in this series. God calls, accompanies, opens doors, closes others, creates something new, gathers unlikely people into one Body, and asks us to leave some things on the shore. But none of those beginnings was ever meant to become a place where we could settle permanently and announce that the work was finished.

Paul refuses to make that claim even after everything he has experienced. He has not arrived.

Neither have we.

That is not failure. It is discipleship.

A God beginning is not a finish line disguised as a starting point. It is an invitation into a life continually being transformed by Christ, and that transformation happens in the present. It happens in the conversation we choose to have, the person we decide to notice, the injustice we refuse to ignore, the forgiveness we offer, the truth we finally speak, the tradition we are willing to reconsider, the neighbor we welcome, and the work immediately before us.

We can honor yesterday without living there. We can hope for tomorrow without escaping into it. And we can live faithfully today while trusting that God is already preparing what lies ahead.

Sixteen devotions ago, we began talking about God beginnings. Now we have reached the end.

Except, of course, we haven’t.

Every ending eventually becomes part of what lies behind us, and every new beginning eventually becomes the present in which we are called to live.

Remember what God has done. Look toward what God may yet do. But live faithfully where God has placed you today, and from here, keep following Christ toward what lies ahead.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Faith remembers yesterday, hopes for tomorrow, and follows Christ today.

PRAYER
God of every beginning, keep me from becoming trapped in yesterday or lost in tomorrow. Teach me to live faithfully today, trusting you with whatever lies ahead. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

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REVISITED: The Search for the Holy Grail

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Read 1 Corinthian 11:17-34

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE “For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:26 CEB)

I just recently watched the film, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” This has always been my favorite of the four films because it deals with Indiana Jones’ quest to find the Holy Grail. While I am sure most of you know what the Holy Grail is, for those of you who don’t the Holy Grail is the cup of which Jesus Christ and the Twelve Apostles drank from during the Last Supper. Indiana’s father (played by Sean Connery) had been searching for the Grail his whole life, but when he gets close to finding it he disappears. Indiana then picks up where is father left off in order to not only find the Grail but to also find his father.

Before embarking on the quest, Indy turns to his friend, Marcus Brody, and asks him if he thinks there is actually any truth to the legend of the Holy Grail. Marcus responded, “The search for the Holy Grail is the search for the divine in all of us.” This statement hit me in a way it never really did before. I think as a younger person, I never fully understood the profound implication of that statement; yet, as a grown adult and a trained theologian, the proclamation is actually a revelation of the nature of who we are in Christ Jesus. This is not just some Hollywood-contrived revelation, but is a revelation we find throughout the Bible.

When we think of the Holy Grail, we think of the Last Supper, we think of the Knights of the Round Table, we think of Indiana Jones, we think of Monty Python, and some may even think of Dan Brown’s controversial work of fiction, “The Da Vinci Code.” Almost always, the Holy Grail is thought of as an object, as the cup that held the wine (aka blood) of Jesus Christ. In the case of the Indiana Jones film, the cup itself was holy and had magical powers of healing and rejuvenation as a result of Christ using it it in such a holy moment in history. In books like the Da Vinci Code, the Holy Grail is a woman (going back to Mary Magdalene) who carried on the bloodline of Jesus Christ. Again, like the cup, the woman is merely important because she’s bearing the bloodline of Jesus.

What I noticed was that, when thinking of the Holy Grail, we tend to lose the bigger picture for the smaller details. We lose the significance of the Holy Grail when we cheapen it to being a “cup” or a “womb” or anything else. Marcus Brody points us to a deep truth when he says, “The search for the Holy Grail is the search for the divine in all of us.” Indeed. Jesus didn’t hold The Last Supper in order to turn a cup into an idol. Also, to get caught up in the “married Jesus” debate is to completely miss the entire point of Jesus ministry and the Last Supper.

In the act of “eating his flesh” and “drinking his blood”, the disciples are taking Jesus into themselves and making him a part of their own identity. In other words they, in that sacred moment and from that time forward, become the Holy Grail…bearing the grace and the love of Jesus to all the world. Just as Jesus was the Son of God, we who believe in Christ and partake in Holy Communion as a public profession of our faith, take on the identity of sons and daughters of God. I am sure some of my Protestant brothers and sisters might be questioning if I am taking Communion a little too literally. While I am not, I would say that to question that is to miss the truth of the above.

Whether we believe in Transubstantiation, Consubstantiation, or we believe that the Sacrament of Holy Communion is a symbol of God’s grace and forgiveness for us, the fact remains that Holy Communion is a reminder that we are called to be the Holy Grails of Christ. We are called to be the vessels that bear Christ’s love in the world. We are called to be Sacramental and to be transformational. We are called to be agents of Christ’s grace and witnesses to the presence of God. Remember this the next time you partake in communion and be transformed.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY “The search for the Holy Grail is the search for the divine in all of us.” – Marcus Brody in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”.

PRAYER Lord, I am your vessel fill me with your grace so that I may bear witness to your grace in the lives of others. Amen.

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REVISITED: Let Harmony Ring

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Read Psalm 133

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE

“For you have been called to live in freedom, my brothers and sisters. But don’t use your freedom to satisfy your sinful nature. Instead, use your freedom to serve one another in love. For the whole law can be summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you are always biting and devouring one another, watch out! Beware of destroying one another.” (Galatians 5:13-15)

Every person who has ever walked the earth has run into somebody at some point that they just don’t like. Perhaps the person seems snooty, or they just rub you the wrong way; we have all had the experience of being around people who seem to clash with our personalities and sensibilities. It is an unavoidable consequence to living in a community.

I have often heard some even state that they “hate” people out of frustration because of the way someone else treated them. To be completely honest, I have found myself uttering those words…especially when I used to commute long distances in heavy traffic. I have no doubt that I am not alone when I say that there are times I wish I were alone with no one else around to cut me off, give me attitude, or say something hurtful to me.

Yet, when we stop to think about it, the alternative is far, far worse. Just take a moment and try and imagine a world in which you truly were alone. Try and imagine a world where there was, literally, no one around to “bother” you. What kind of world would that be? How would you truly manage without the presence of others? How would you survive even a day without others to socially interact with?

There are many movies that try and picture what such an apocalyptic world would look like, where a person wakes up to find him or herself isolated in a world where no other human life exists. These films usually throw in zombies or other human survivors and never really explore what life alone would truly be like. Perhaps that is because life alone is something we really cannot fathom…it’s something that goes against our very nature and experience as human beings.

As children of God, we were designed to be in relationship with one another. We were called to live in harmony with other people. Some people get the idea that harmony means that we all hold hands and agree to skip down the yellow brick road together; however, that is not true harmony at all. Harmony is not someone always agreeing with me and what I believe to be correct; rather, harmony happens when people simultaneously put aside their differences to find common ground to stand on.

Harmony takes work. It does not come easy; however, we were created to live harmoniously with each other. God does not wish for us to gossip, slander, hold grudges, or be hateful toward others; rather, God wants us to be loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good and faithful toward one another. We should be striving to bring harmony into our communities, not discord.

Today’s challenge for us is to be agents of harmony. There are plenty of people who will rub us the wrong way, there are plenty of people who we will not particularly like, and there are certainly plenty of people who are different than us. Today we are being challenged to look past that and to see the commonality that we all share together…the commonality of being children of God, made in God’s image. Look past the differences, allow for people to be who they are, and love them as God loves them. Let the harmonizing begin!

THOUGHT OF THE DAY

“Live in harmony with each other. Don’t be too proud to enjoy the company of ordinary people. And don’t think you know it all!” – The Apostle Paul in Romans 12:16

PRAYER

Lord, I pray that I may become an agent of harmony within the communities I am a part of. Amen.

Devotional, Previous Post

REVISITED: Dying for Both Sides

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Read Galatians 2

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Pray that I will be rescued from those in Judea who refuse to obey God. Pray also that the believers there will be willing to accept the donation I am taking to Jerusalem.” (Romans 15:31)

In the Bible, there is a man named Saul who was born in the city of Tarsus in the Roman province of Cilicia. He was well educated and rose up to be a scholar of the Torah, a Pharisee, and a zealous defender of the Jewish faith. When a new sect of Judaism broke out claiming that a Nazarene rabbi by the name of Yeshua bar Joseph was the messiah and that Gentiles should be included in the Jewish covenant, he lashed out against the group, having many of them arrested. According to Acts, one was even killed.

With that said, this Saul encountered the risen Yeshua, you may know him by his Greek name Jesus, somewhere in or around Damascus, which is a city in Syria. This experience transformed Saul into a follower of Jesus. Paul tells us in his letter to the Galatians that, following the encounter with Christ, he went into Arabia for a while and then came back to Damascus. After three years he went to Jerusalem and met with Jesus’ brother James, and his disciples Peter and John.

To make a long story short, Jesus’ brother James and Paul didn’t really get along…at all. Peter and John weren’t too crazy about Paul either. James believed that in order for Gentiles (non-Jews) to become a follower of Christ they had to first become Jewish, since Jesus was a Jew. Paul thought this was ludicrous, seeing Jesus’ death and resurrection as the opening up of the covenant to Gentiles. If they had faith in Jesus who was likened to a Gentile on the cross (being under God’s curse as the Torah claims of anyone hung on a tree), then they would be brought into the Jewish covenant despite not being circumcised or being bound to any one of the Jewish laws.

Though they struck a deal and Paul left thinking he had their blessing to go and preach the Gospel as he felt Jesus had called him to do, James, Peter and John never really accepted Paul’s vision. We find out from Paul in his letter to the Galatians, and in Acts, that James and his followers were counteracting Paul’s Gospel message and causing people to question this “self-proclaimed apostle” who had never been an eye-witness of Jesus. This angered Paul, as anyone would imagine, but it did not stop him from trying.

Paul had been gathering up a collection for the church in Jerusalem and he was going to bring that collection to them, hoping to reconcile their differences if it cost him his very life. Paul was afraid it would. His last written words, written to the church in Rome (a community he had never met), ask for prayers that the non-believing Jews won’t attack him (as he was a heretic in their eyes having abandoned his Pharisaic Judaism for this new messianic Judaism) and that the church in Jerusalem would accept his offering. Unfortunately, his prayers were not answered.

Paul was arrested, and eventually died, trying to get both sides (his and James’) to be unified, even if different, in the cause of Christ. Today, like then, the church is split on many fronts and we seem to get stuck on one side or the other. We fail to see Christ in the midst of our differences. Like Paul, we are called to see Christ in those who believe differently than us. We are called to find the balance of reconciliation, even while remaining true to what we firmly believe. There are many contentious issues dividing the church, yet there is still ONE Lord! Rather than deeming each other heretics, let us have the grace and the humility to see that Christ is indeed working in, through, and in spite of us all! Remember, he Gospel calls us to be a people who are unified in LOVE, even if divided by difference.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
“You don’t get unity by ignoring the questions that have to be faced.” – Jay Weatherill

PRAYER
Lord, help me to see you even in those who think and believe differently than me. Humble me, I pray. Amen.

Devotional, Previous Post

REVISITED: Thanksgiving Day

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Read Psalm 100

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Let your roots grow down into Him, and let your lives be built on Him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness.” (Colossians 2:7 NLT)

Well, it is getting to be that time isn’t it. Tomorrow is the holiday that we in America call Turkey day…I mean Thanksgiving Day. After all, not all of us eat Turkey, and all of the turkeys that survive T-Day are ever thankful for that! All jokes aside, this is the holiday that begs Americans to remember the story of the Pilgrims. When the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts in 1620, they were not prepared for life in the wilderness and they did not really know what to grow or when to grow it. Enter in the Native Americans, namely the Wampanoag tribe, who taught the settlers how to survive (including how to grow and harvest their food) in exchange for protection against tribal enemies.

By the time of the first Thanksgiving meal, there were only 50 out of 100 Pilgrims alive to share in the meal. Half of them had died during the first winter in the New World. Those remaining Pilgrims invited 90 Wompanoag to share with them in a feast, as a way of giving thanks to them and to God for their alliance and survival. Of course there is a ton more to the history than what I have recounted here; however, this is the gist of the story that the Thanksgiving Day observance in the U.S. is centered on.

Of course, it wasn’t long before more settlers showed up in Massachusetts and it is quite unfortunate that the original thankfulness that the Pilgrims had shown toward their Native American neighbors had all but been forgotten. The rest is sadly history. The European settlers flourished and grew in numbers, while the Wampanoag suffered major losses in their population. The European settlers, unbeknownst to them, brought bacteria and illnesses which killed many within the Wampanoag tribe. On top of that, with the European settlers came Western Civilization and it’s wars. One such war was King Phillip’s war, where the English colonists and their Native American allies fought against other Native American tribes. During that war, the Wampanog lost over 40 percent of its population and many of the surviving males in their tribe were sold into slavery in the West Indies. On top of that, many of the women and children were enslaved in New England. So much for the spirit of thankfulness, huh?

While this may seem like ancient history, the fact remains that the very feast we partake in year after year is rooted in that ancient history. What’s more, like the original Thanksgiving between the Settlers and Wampanoag tribe, our Thanksgiving is so short-lived that we often forget what we were even thankful for before the turkey, or Tofurky, coma settles in. In fact, it seems like our thankfulness is, by and large, nothing more than a trivial tradition that bears little resemblance to true thankfulness.

The challenge for us is become a truly thankful people who do not trivialize such an important part of what we were created to be. Let us begin to truly be thankful for everything we have been given. Too often we express our thankfulness through words, but words are so often very cheap! The first Pilgrims did not express their thankfulness merely with words, but through their actions in protecting their Native American allies and through inviting them to share in their harvest feast! Let us, too, be a people who show God that we are truly thankful by sharing what we have with others, no matter how unlikely it may seem for us to have a relationship with them. God has created us all and has provided all of us with all that we need. If we are truly thankful for those things, and if we truly recognize that everything we have are gifts from God, then we will not hesitate in being generous in our giving and THANKFUL in our living! This Thanksgiving, make thankfulness the meat that you feast on!

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
“Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” – Melodie Beattie

PRAYER
Gracious God, I thank you for all that I have including my life. Give me the strength take what I have and share it with those in need, so that my thankfulness can move from words into action. Amen.

Devotional

REVISITED: Meet Antichrist

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Read 1 John 2:18-24

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.” (Galatians 5:22-23 NRSV)

The Western world is fixated with the apocalypse aren’t we? We are fascinated with the end of the world, with doom and gloom, with the destruction of all things and the idea of living in a dystopic world. From “The Walking Dead”, to “The Hunger Games,” to “Divergent”, there are tons of apocalyptic, dystopic films and books out on the market. Perhaps such a world is more than just a fixation, but an underlying fear.

There is a lot to be afraid of in today’s world, isn’t there. There are religious extremists, in all religions, who are wreaking havoc on people who don’t believe exactly as they do. There are Deadly viruses killing tens of thousands of people and taking the world by storm. There are dysfunctional governments warring over power and ideologies. Every day there are reports of beheadings, kidnappings, grisly murders, riots, hatred, violent uprisings and much, much more.  It seems like at every turn, the world is falling a part at the seams. No wonder the fixation with the end of the world.

And often when we think of the end of the world within the Christianized Western world, we can’t help but imagine that dark forces are aligning against humankind and , often times, those dark forces are embodied by an all-evil entity, envisioned as the “son of Satan”, named the “antichrist.” Yet, the antichrist, as we have come to understand the word, is little more than great fiction based off of a misinterpretation of Scripture. Don’t misunderstand me, as I am NOT saying that the Bible makes no mention of the antichrist. What I AM saying is that the Bible does NOT say the antichrist will be a humanesque demon, named Nicolae Carpathia, who seeks to war with God following a mythical disappearance of millions of God’s neatly dressed holy-rollers.

What the Bible does say about antichrist is that it is a spirit. It is not a spirit of outside forces trying to penetrate the church; rather, it is a spirit that has already penetrated the church and is seeking to destroy the church from within. Whereas the Spirit of God seeks to bring about hope, healing and wholeness, the spirit of antichrist seeks to bring about hopelessness, dis-ease, and disunity. The Spirit of God seeks to love, to encourage, to seek justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly, to show compassion, to be gentle, to be kind, to be patient, and to be unified in love with God’s creation. The spirit of antichrist seeks to undercut, to undermine, to be proud, to live selfishly, to be wrathful, to seek vengeance, to show ruthlessness, to be divisive and to quell the Spirit and the presence of God.

Antichrist, in short, is exactly as it sounds. It is anything that stands opposed to Christ. Practically speaking, if the way we are acting and living is counter to the teachings and example of Christ, then we are living in the spirit of antichrist. I have seen the church adopt tons of models of how it approaches ministry in the world, everything from the business model, to a political model, to an entertainment model; however, the church is not a buisness, nor is it a political machine, nor is it merely an entertainment agency. The church is Christ’s body, broken and resurrected, filled with the power of God to bring about hope, healing and wholeness.

We all have the potential to get caught up and even derailed by the spirit of antichrist; however, this is a power within you that is greater than any other spirit surrounding you. That very power is from God and it is empowering you to live your life in the Spirit of Christ, in a way that heals others, that builds them up, that invites them to discover their purpose in life, that challenges them to grow, and that shares the unconditional love that God has shared with you. Seek first God’s Kingdom, be filled with God’s Spirit, and live accordingly.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
“If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.” – Paul of Tarsus in Galatians 5:25

PRAYER
Lord, I seek to live by your Spirit and your Spirit alone. Allow me to not only move beyond negative spirits and influences so that in you I may truly shine and be a blessing to others. Amen.