There are two trees in the Garden: The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The trees are metaphors for the way we live, work, interact, feed, and function. Our human operating system, our paradigm, our perception. One represents holistic vision. The other is a cracked lens. The cracked lens […]
If the message of Jesus had to be summed in one phrase, one of my contenders would be Matthew 6:33, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven.” Arguably, Jesus’ primary message is to love one another (John 13:34). Or perhaps it’s his instruction about the importance of the first two commandments (Mark 12:29-31). What about […]
“You can see the speck in your friend’s eye, but you don’t notice the log in your own eye.” (Matthew 7:3) It’s one of many truth bombs that litter the early chapters of the Gospel of Matthew. For a long time, it surprised me how little this verse seemed to pop up in Christian discourse […]
I’m concluding this series on New Earth emotional tools with what may seem an unlikely tool: play. What kind of bizarre tool is play? Surely, that’s the world of children, not gown-ups, of garages and workshops? Yes. Absolutely. And the New Testament makes some pointed comments about that world. “Childish ways” Perhaps the most famous […]
Honouring? Eh? What kind of a tool is that? A very powerful one. Many years ago, when I was a young man, I left New Zealand on my own on a world trip. My first stop was Tokyo, where I spent several days. Cleaning ashtrays One day, I was walking along a footpath. There were […]
For this nineteenth tool in the New Earth series I’d like to discuss a tool whose power I have only recently come to recognise: compassion. That itself seems weird, because I consider it to be one of the four key values of Jesus: non-judgment, forgiveness, compassion, and unconditional love. Although the word doesn’t appear in the Bible […]
In this New Earth Tools series we’ve looked at a lot of useful emotional tools. Some of the tools we need at our sides all the time, like a carpenter who wears a tool-belt of essential tools. Other tools sit in our toolbox and gather dust till we need them. Today’s tool is a little bit […]
The Old Testament is an incredibly accurate emotional account of its time. In it, I see the eternal brilliance of God shining through very temporal commands. Paul understood their transient nature: “[The Law] was only supposed to last until the coming of that descendant who was given the promise.” (Galatians 3:19) Then came Jesus: “The kingdom […]
The first five books of the Bible—the Pentateuch—contain 613 commands [1]. Rules were necessary to bond tribes together against outsiders, to stop tribes weakening themselves through infighting, and to normalise the taboos on all things feminine that arose from environmental stress: Reward togetherness: “You will get more and more cattle, sheep, silver, gold, and other possessions.” […]
Forgiveness is a word that gets bandied around a lot. Phrases like “forgive and forget,” or variations, like “I will forgive but I won’t forget,” trip easily from our tongues, often with little thought—let alone genuine—attached to them. Yet Jesus is explicit on the reciprocal nature of forgiveness. “If you forgive others for the wrongs they do […]