2024 Dutch Festival Sermon: Better Than Gold
I always credit my third and fourth grade teacher, Laura Schmidt, as being one of the reasons that I love to read. Every day after lunch break and recess, Laura would read to us from one of the Little House on the Prairie books. Now, not being content, not knowing how the stories were going to end up going in this book series, I decided to get the books myself and read ahead. I was not content with Laura's pace. I obtained those books for myself, and I read through them all multiple times.
Reading Scripture with Christ at the Center
When it comes to reading the Bible there is one thing that I hear more than anything else. People have trouble understanding some parts of the Bible. I believe that a significant part of this is rooted in the way that we view the Bible. Rethinking how we view the Bible is an important first step for knowing how to understand it and apply it.
When I was younger, I read the Bible looking for things I could do. I saw the Bible as a big book that was filled with stories and rules that were telling me how to live. In a sense, this is true. God's word shows us how to live, but I was approaching it completely from the wrong perspective.
Bible Vocab: Holiness
Holiness is a word that I did not initially have on my list of words to feature as "Bible Vocab". I thought that it was a word that was pretty easy to understand. While I think most of us have a concept of what the word holiness means, do we really grasp it? Do we really understand the scope of it? These thoughts came to mind as I was preparing the sermon for February 19, 2017, and read Leviticus 19:2 where it says, "Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy". Preparing a sermon on this really caused me to ponder what exactly the word holiness means.