The Joshua Victor Theory

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. Today we’re in the fourth part of our series on the book of Galatians. And sin, law, faith, and Christ are the focus of today’s reading. Faith is a tremendously important word to us, and is widely “borrowed” even outside the church. But it’s often used in a fuzzy and vague way. Statements like “you just gotta have faith”, for example. Faith in what? Believe in yourself? Believe that everything will just be ok, even if it doesn’t seem that way? On the other hand, the Bible uses the word faith with great clarity. The closest synonym to faith would be “trust”—and both faith and trust must always have an object. The person or thing faith or trust looks to. That which we believe in. This helps us understand that faith or trust can’t really exist by itself, “aimed at nothing”—or it will receive exactly nothing. Also, we’ll see that faith or trust aimed at the wrong person or thing, won’t do u...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. In today’s Gospel we have a picture of Jesus being rejected in His hometown, and later how He prepares His disciples for similar rejection. But we also have a picture of how this rejection gave His Gospel, the good news, the momentum to scatter and spread to all sorts of new places. “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown,” Jesus said. Let’s honor Jesus today in our hearts by receiving His Gospel. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. Many people live with a crippling fear of rejection. They won’t act to seize opportunity because they fear that they’ll be rejected. The anticipation of that pain holds them back from action. But thanks be to God that Jesus wasn’t controlled by any such fear of rejection! He faced harsh and real rejection again and again. In His hometown of Nazareth, among family and friends He’d known from childhood, He r...