The Joshua Victor Theory

  Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed, Alleluia! This is the end of 1 John. A letter of faith and love. Re-read the whole letter once or twice this week and reflect on its resurrection messages and the new life we’re given. There’s always more there than we can unpack. Mine the Bible for those precious jewels. God’s Word is a treasure trove for your life! Today we’re mining the word “testimony.” In chapter 5, John compares the testimony of God to the testimony of man. Testimony is a borrowed word from the courtrooms. Witnesses give their testimony to what they’ve seen or heard. “Martyr” is Greek for “witness” and later came to mean someone who died for their testimony, because so many early Christians were put to death because they wouldn’t deny, change, or surrender their testimony to Jesus Christ and His resurrection. A “testimony” or “witness” has a certain “weight” to it. A court weighs whether they can trust the witnesses. That takes discernment. We talked two weeks ago ab...

  Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. In 1 John 5 let’s consider how you’re “Children of New Life.” We’re familiar with our old life under sin and the condemnation of the law. Our daily experience in a broken world. Old life is as familiar as worn-out shoes. But Christ calls us to a new life. Learning, growth, and a new identity. Children of God are born for a new life. 1 John teaches our new life centers around simple things: faith, love, and the true confession of Jesus. First, in v. 1, John writes: “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him.” Believing in Jesus as the Christ and loving God the Father are marks of the children of God. Believing and loving. We don’t become children of God by doing those things, but because Christ first loved us, and by His own will, we were born of God (John 1:12-13). We become who we are by being...

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In Matthew 10 Jesus sends out His apostles on the mission of His kingdom. Life in His kingdom is not an easy mission—quite the opposite—He promises it will be hard. Expect it. Thinking of quitting or surrendering? Jesus speaks courage to your heart! He transforms fear into courage in His kingdom. Let’s see how. In verses 26-33, Jesus uses the word “fear” four times. Three times it’s: “ Don’t fear ”; and once it’s to “ fear God .” What’s there to be afraid of? When you stand up and live for Jesus, you will be misunderstood and rejected, like Him. You can potentially face mockery, hatred, persecution, and in the worst cases, death. Many fears in life are exaggerated and blown out of proportion. But some are perfectly real. But whatever the fear, Jesus calls: “ Fear not.” Virtually no one is trying to kill us because we are Christian. We live in a free country. But that kind of extreme persec...

            Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. Today our two readings are both about languages, and unity or disunity. In the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, all the earth once spoke one language and had the same words. But because of what happened there, God confused their languages, dividing them, so they couldn’t understand each other. The story of Pentecost, in Acts, is about how people of many different languages united across language barriers to hear a singular, important message. Let’s look at each story in turn, and see how Pentecost starts to reverse the age-old division of languages at Babel, and create a new unity around Jesus Christ. In the words of the crowds on Pentecost: “ we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God .”             At the Tower of Babel humans unified in the...

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. As we’ve gone through the chapters of Mark these last weeks, it continues to hit me how the experiences of the community in Jesus’ day mirrors in many ways our present day world. Even the grisly executions done by ISIS echo and multiply the violent death of John the Baptist for standing for the truth. This Gospel reading is marked by rejection and misidentification of Jesus—so that right from the first verse, King Herod and the community are mistaking the miracles and works of Jesus and His disciples, for John the Baptist risen from the dead. With misidentification, superstition, scandal, incest, a prophet speaking the truth and righteousness, a conflicted conscience, a murderous grudge, rash vow, persecution, and gory ending, this story has all the elements of a modern movie drama. The reading explains through a flashback, that Herod had recently killed John, and he and the peop...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Last week we talked about bearing witness, or “taking the stand” for Jesus, as we are called by God to testify about who Jesus is and what He has done for us. Today is Pentecost, the celebration of the giving of the Holy Spirit to the Christian Church. It was the day when the apostles of Jesus first gave public witness of what they had seen of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John, that one of the primary jobs of the Holy Spirit is also to testify or bear witness about Him. In the Gospel reading Jesus gives His disciples a preview of the coming and work of the Holy Spirit. The key work of the Spirit is to point people to Jesus. He doesn’t take the disciples in a different direction than where Jesus has led them, but continues on the same mission for which Jesus had prepared them. If we step back a moment from this reading, we see that all three persons of the Trinity—Father, So...