Throughout His ministry, Jesus healed those who came across His path. Healing was not a side activity in His ministry; it was central to His mission. At the beginning of His public ministry, Jesus stood in the synagogue, unrolled the scroll of Isaiah, and read: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he…

Our question for today comes from Mark chapter 10. I’m going to read two consecutive stories in which Jesus asks the exact same question in two very different situations. As you listen, pay close attention to the question Jesus asks—and to the very different answers he receives. The Request of James and John 35 Then James…

We have been examining the questions God asks throughout Scripture. Again and again, God asks questions whose factual answers seem obvious. This raises an important question for us: why does God ask what He already knows? Are these questions merely rhetorical, or do they have a deeper purpose? Do they change the way we see…

In Talk One of this series on Ecclesiastes, we learned that there are limits to how much we may know and how much we may achieve in life “under the sun.” The more the Preacher learns, the more aware he becomes of how much remains unknown.  In Talk Two, we explored the strange tension between…

We have followed the Preacher’s search for meaning through wisdom, knowledge, pleasure, accomplishment, work, and the passage of time; and consistently find that they are just not enough. Society is simply too unjust to explain.  “I saw under the sun that in the place of judgment, wickedness was there; and in the place of righteousness,…

We’ve noted that the Preacher seems to doubt that wisdom and knowledge are enough to give life meaning. He said: “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” (Ecclesiastes 1:18) We then turned to the famous poem of Ecclesiastes 3: “To every thing there is a season, and a…