Walking Through the Fire

Jesus’ words in Luke 6 stop me cold every time: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.” He’s not condemning wealth — He’s confronting comfort. And that’s a hard word in a world where we work hard  for  comfort. This third entry in the  Love Is a Verb  series isn’t about money management or guilt. It’s about spiritual numbness — the kind that creeps in when we get so used to our blessings that we stop noticing who’s been left out of them. In Luke 16, Jesus tells the story of a rich man and a poor man named Lazarus. The rich man isn’t cruel. He’s not abusive. He’s just… indifferent. He never noticed the suffering at his gate. And that’s the indictment. This is where biblical justice comes in. We often think of justice as grand gestures or political positions. But sometimes, justice is just learning to see — to notice the needs at our gate. To loosen our grip. To let someone else in. If love is a verb, then justice is love’s hardest expres...

I've been the pastor at Lantana Community Church for several years now. In that time, we've talked about love...ALOT. But love for us isn't the kind of love that we bottle up and keep to ourselves, its a love that flows through us and to others. It's the kind of love Jesus meant when He said, " As I have loved you, so you must love one another " (John 13:34). We're talking about the kind of love that gives of self, sacrificially. The kind of love that serves others and considers others better than ourselves. With this blog post, I want to talk about that type of love. The next several posts will be part of a series I'm calling Love is a Verb . (That sounded way better in my head, haha. Typing it out just now it seems like an overused phrase.) This series is built around a five sermon series I preached on biblical justice. This isn't political commentary, and it's not sociology or economics, it's pastoral. It's theological. It's bibl...