Pathway Weeklies

“For not from the east or from the west and not from the wilderness comes lifting up, but it is God who executes judgment, putting down one and lifting up another” (Psalm 75:6-7). We likely find comfort and calm when the Scriptures speak of God’s mercy and love, but become unsettled where God exercises judgment according to His sovereign will. The account of the commander of the Lord’s army provid...

The rubric called “muscle memory” means we can reproduce a particular movement without using conscious thought. Frequent repetition makes this effort possible. Allow me to coin a phrase: moral memory. It means that we learn to respond to those around us like God has demonstrated with us. We must always keep God’s goodness to us in mind, and it is to be evident in how we treat those who are the wea...

“Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness, the nourishment of the mind with His truth, the purifying of the imagination of His beauty, the opening of the heart to His love, the surrender of the will to His purpose” (William Temple). Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942-1944, indeed encapsulates the heart of worship. Hardly any...

Jesus came to seek and to save suffering humanity. The familiar narrative of the Gerasene demoniac reminds us that Jesus has authority and power over debilitating mental illnesses (cf. Lk 8:26-39). He also demonstrated His control over nature (Luke 8:22) and crippling physical illnesses (Luke 8:43:48), as well as power over death itself (Luke 8:40-42, 49-56). The point was to show that He indeed i...

“I argue that the Jesus of the Gospels is essentially a myth,” wrote Alvar Ellegård, a Swedish author on religion and science.[1] There have been those, like Ellegård, who for well over a century have claimed that there was some sort of Christ myth that grew among Jesus’ earthly followers. There were no real miracles, there was no resurrection, and there was certainly nothing divine about Jesus of...

Sometimes the Lord permits us to see “just over the hilltop” to know our future. A growing chain of circumstances seems to be challenging the contemporary church to recognize and understand more clearly how to live faithfully in challenging times. We know the Spirit “blows where He wills” (John 3:8), which means we may not always know immediately the direction our lives are headed. However, we may...

There is much about our current worship that is rushed and shallow. We need to enter our places of worship prepared in heart to encounter our holy God. We need to follow the labyrinth! Labyrinths have been used for centuries to aid worshipers with eliminating distractions in prayer and devotion and drawing closer to God. The psalmist provides us with a labyrinth of sorts to guide us to proper wors...

Nothing stops quicker the bread of church life from rising than a lack of the Spirit. Acts chapter 5 presents us with evidence that the controlling presence in the daily life of the church must be the Holy Spirit. This permeating authority of the Spirit, in fact, gives rise to Christian moral influence, and must be guarded carefully. Many of our churches have bad dough, and they do not know why. L...

“The believer essentially becomes one who hopes . . . His future depends utterly and entirely on the outcome of the risen Lord’s course, for he has staked his future on the future of Christ” (HCBC, Jürgen Moltmann). Luke 19:45-21:4, which encompasses our focal passage, provides us with a view of the final confrontations Jesus had in His earthly ministry. Jesus’ rule will be radically different, an...

Real life, according to Jesus, is life lived in relationship with Him. His words in this passage appear at first glance to be as cold as sub-freezing temperatures in winter. I know phrases like “after he has killed” and “cast you into hell” do not seem to inspire closeness to God, but Jesus also states that the Heavenly Father values us! Frankly, Jesus tells us how to know the warmth of a daily re...