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Jesus Creed

Contextually, in the Sermon on the Mount the Lord’s Prayer illustrates “short prayer” in contrast to Gentile verbosity. In this sense, Matt 6:7-15 interrupts the flow of the principle established in 6:1: doing things to be seen by others shifts to manipulating God by long-windedness. And instead of hypocrites being the foil, we now have…

Well, I’ve had a chat with my literary critic with whom I had spoken about memoirs, and I wish to back down from my genre definition and say that, from what I understand of Frey’s memoir, he is too fancy-free with the facts to fit within the memoir category. I stand corrected and so I…

Matt 6:5-6 is the second example of the principle of “no footprints” found in 6:1. It concerns prayer and its central idea is simple and profound: let not our prayer lives be “conspicuous prayer.” We all know what “conspicuous consumerism” is: wear Nikes, wear Uggs, wear Tiger Wood golf hats … wear things that get…

Yesterday a blogger commented that Fitch got him to recall, in his chps 4-5, that IH Marshall had written an article back in 1985 that argued that the NT evidence does not suggest the Christians got together for “worship” (as we tend to define it) but to learn and to exhort and to fellowship. This…

Let me risk venturing into the realm of politics. There has been a call for more Christians, especially those of us who are smitten with the idea of a generous orthodoxy, to engage in a “purple” politics — and by that is meant a politics that absorbs the good in “red” and “blue” so that…

The principle of 6:1 is now fleshed out for “almsgiving” — the Jewish practice of compassion on the poor and needy. After the Temple was destroyed, almsgiving was sometimes depicted as a replacement for sacrifices. The word for “almsgiving” in Hebrew is a near-equivalent to “righteousness”: the transition from 6:1 to 6:2 then is verbal…

The seventh chp in David Fitch’s The Great Giveaway concerns spiritual formation. The primary direction of the chp is to return counseling to the church and to get more church in the psychologist’s office. [Now he’s meddling with my wife’s vocation.] He challenges the authority inherent to Christian therapy and the narrative structure that many…

Perhaps you are unaware, but The Wall Street Journal, in its Jan 8-9 weekend edition, had a story about Prof Joshua Hochschild, a philosophy professor at Wheaton who converted to Roman Catholicism and then was released by Wheaton because his theology was considered no longer sufficiently evangelical — in spite of his willingness to sign…

So far David Fitch, in his provocative book, The Great Giveaway, has taken on the pillars of evangelical church life: success, evangelism, leadership, experience, and preaching. He will also address spiritual formation and moral education. But, I’m particularly happy he has devoted a chapter to “justice” because most evangelical books about the Church simply don’t…

Matthew 6:1 is the theme verse for Matthew 6:2-18. In fact, 6:1 is the principle and 6:2-18 contains three examples. What we find in 6:1 pertains to giving, to praying, and to fasting. The theme or the principle of 6:1 is simple, simple, simple:
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