The eschaton is not merely the future end of time. It is the eternal reality of Christ breaking into the concrete “now” of our lives.
*Hope to explore this more with you as we unpackage the Book of Revelation through a more Christological lens - the extended E-course launches in just a couple weeks!
If you’re waiting for a third temple to be constructed and nuclear war with Israel to usher in the end of the world, rest assured you are already the new temple, and the end of the old order has already come upon us. When we view the Book of Revelation for what it actually is: an apocalypse, that is an “unveiling” of Jesus Christ … we likewise learn something critical about ourselves. For we too, together with all of creation, become an apocalypse of Jesus Christ.
FYI … our six-week deep dive into Revelation kicks off in just a couple weeks!
Salvation is not a ticket out of hell and into heaven on the condition that you believe before you die. Salvation is God Himself become flesh, the True Believer, who brought heaven into our hell, conquering death by death.
If you’re a dad and this video doesn’t get you in the feels, check your pulse
Reminder for all dads reading this, myself included:
Say yes more often
The dad in this video could have easily drove off, or said “Not now, I’m in a hurry”
Instead he chose to put off whatever he was doing and bond with his son
My guess is he’d say it was worth it
Little moments like this add up in our kids’ conscious and subconscious memories, and it’s always better to have more “yes” moments than “no” moments
Pale Blue Dot is a photo of Earth that was taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990 from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) as it was leaving our solar system. This is what Carl Sagan said about the photo:
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor, and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
Most folks never truly experience prayer (or give up on it altogether), because it has been scarcely defined for them, even in so-called “prayer movements.”
Prayer is not some exercise separate from life. Your whole life is a prayer (just as worship encompasses your entire existence, not just 45 minutes of caterwauling karaoke on Sunday morning).
True prayer is beyond our (often impotent) asking for things. Beyond requests and even conversations, it is beyond *words.* Words help us, but only as catalysts to go beyond them. Prayer is getting underneath the idol images of God we have projected on the backdrop of our imagination that tend to run our lives.
The deepest prayer is a silent communion, a laying aside of all thought (even and especially lofty spiritual ones), and presenting ourselves in a formless quietude before the One who already knows all things. It is taking time to be untethered from the world, to be shaped in this silence by the One who is beyond all being and beyond all silence.
But we have forgotten this silence. And thus forgotten ourselves. Silence is not absence, but a deep and permeating recognition of His Presence.
When you walk away from what is popular and search for what is true, you will find beauty and treasure in the most unlikely places. The first of those places is in you.
Let God through.