After wrapping up the Flip Side Book Club’s reading of Spiritual Friendship, Noah interviews author Wes Hill on the book’s subject of providing a path of love for celibate gay Christians.
Psalm 7 Devotional – How Great of a Gift this Truly is
Covenants aside, this psalm is still a great reminder to let God search our hearts. As followers of Jesus, we don’t want sin in our lives. Jesus is the path of life and we want that life flowing through us and in us. And we love Jesus! He clearly tells us if you love me, you’ll obey what I command (John 14:15). We don’t obey to earn his love, our obedience is the expression and result of our love for him. Sometimes it feels like there are two types of churches: those that talk about sin and God’s wrath way too much and those who don’t talk about it nearly enough. Psalm 7 is a good reminder that we need to talk about our sin and God’s wrath. We can’t fully experience the joy and depth of God’s mercy unless we realize we don’t deserve that mercy. We can only fully experience this joy if we know it is a gift, and what an elaborate gift it is!
The unresolved tension that will never go away for gay / SSA Christians
What I love about Wesley is his ruthless honesty. He essentially spends all of chapter 5 making sure the reader understands he is not presenting a quick fix to the emotional ache that gay / SSA people feel. He wants to make sure gay / SSA Christians, as well as pastors looking for the magic bullet solution to all of this, understand that there is no magic bullet. He wants to make sure people understand if they walk down the path of kinship / covenantal friendship, they will meet pain and disappointment. This is not a good sales pitch! But it is real and it is honest. Us pastors hate this. We want a systematic theology that fixes everything. We want the right answer that grounds us in Scripture and that gives everyone warm fuzzies.
Psalm 5 Devotional – A refuge in a war.
The fifth psalm brings with it some familiar themes from the preceding four: God not answering prayer, lament, crying out to God, and struggle against bloodthirsty adversaries. Whenever Scripture repeats itself, this is a flashing red light to take notice, God is trying to make sure we really understand something. It’s ironic then, how these themes have been lost or minimized in much of modern day Western Christianity. We seem to have crafted a religion around comfort and God making you feel good. Like we are selling a product and we need to convince those in the pew that it works. In order to do so, we have to hide these more uncomfortable truths and only emphasize the happy ones.
Ep. 38: Jesus’ Love for the Outcast & how this Grace Transforms Each of Us
Episode 38 takes us to a recent sermon Noah did on Luke 7:36-50, where a “sinful woman” anoints Jesus’ feet with her hair and tears. This interruption of an elite dinner party led a Pharisee, Jesus, and this woman to have to each make a crucial choice. Their choices are choices that each of us face as well.
Ep. 20: Interview with Jason Redoutey on Vulnerability and Grace Overcoming Shame and Addiction
Noah catches up with Jason Redoutey on how encountering the affirming love of God satisfied Jason’s lifelong quest for approval and affirmation. A quest that led him to a double life of porn, lies, womanizing, and cheating in his marriage. Shame was once the ruler in Jason’s life, shame that has been replaced by love and grace, found through vulnerability. Jason now helps other men find this same overwhelming love of God as one of the directors of Hearts, Alive, and Free.