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Forgiveness

Can’t Get No Satisfaction? Focus Your Faith on the Future Rather Than the Past (Phil. 3:12-14) – June 14, 2009

At a recent Reach Group gathering, a young mother at Highland was telling us how one of her girls has not been to the zoo in many months. The little girl does not want to go to the zoo. Why? “She had a bad experience,” the mother told us. The mom described how, one day, she was at the zoo with her daughter and they were looking at the elephants. All of a sudden the mother heard her daughter crying. She looked over and saw this sight: the daughter had stuck her head through the fence in front of the elephants and now could not pull her head back out of the fence. The mother frantically tried to twist and turn and tug and pull. But the fence would not release the daughter’s head. The mother called her husband and told him to come to the zoo immediately. Emergency personnel had to be summoned. They had to cut and bend that fence. What started as a quiet family trip to the zoo became a public and frantic emergency. Finally, they got the little girl’s head out of the fence. And, it’s for that reason the little girl has not been back to the zoo. “She had a bad experience.”

Read More »Can’t Get No Satisfaction? Focus Your Faith on the Future Rather Than the Past (Phil. 3:12-14) – June 14, 2009

Revolution: The Scandal of Love (Jn. 7:53-8:11)

Time magazine and CNN collaborated recently to create a list of the “Top Ten Scandals” from 2008.[1]  Here are five of them:

1.      New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigns after his infidelity is discovered.

2.      AIG leaders receive an $85 billion bailout then take a lavish $400,000 retreat.

3.      Former senator Bob Edwards cheats on his wife of 31 years. 

4.      Seventeen Gloucester High School students get pregnant as the result of a pact.

5.      Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick resigns after his affair with a former aide is discovered.

Every year notable people make scandalous moral and spiritual choices.

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The Offering: What Happened When God Offered All (Rom. 12:1-2)

Steve Prothero is a Boston University professor and author of the book Religious Literacy.[1]  When Prothero began teaching twenty years ago he found that few students could name the authors of the Christian Gospels.  Fewer could name a single Hindu Scripture.  Almost none could name the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.  This concerned Prothero.  He believes that many political conflicts in world history have had religious roots.  Thus he feels it imperative for students to know something about the religions of the world.  Most of his Boston University students, however, knew nothing.  Thus, this non-Christian professor proposes in his book that students should be required take a course in Bible and World Religions before graduating from high school.

Read More »The Offering: What Happened When God Offered All (Rom. 12:1-2)