Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

I feel old today.

I know. Some of you will think that's ridiculous (especially my older siblings if they ever read this). But aging is not just a matter of the body. It's a complicated set of things that work together to take away our energy and our joy in life. What does it take to make someone new again?...

In that day you will say: "I will praise you, O Lord. Although you were angry with me, your anger has turned away and you have comforted me..."

(My apologies for not posting earlier in the week. Lent is not very conducive to regular blogging.)

Imagine doing your home finances. You are carefully making payments on the bills, writing the checks in the right order and timing them so that none of the money will come out of the account when it can't be covered. Things are close. You make payments against your credit card debt. And you're making progress, but you're not retiring it very quickly. And now it comes time to do your taxes...

 No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.

Do you laugh and roll your eyes at romantic movies, or do you cry? Or maybe both?

I've been reading the novels of Raphael Sabbatini recently. They have bold, adventurous titles like Scaramouche, and Captain Blood. But they're really just love stories with lots of sword play. Sabbatini is just a swashbuckling Jane Austen. But men roll their eyes at Austen and enjoy Sabbatini.

Don't believe me? What was the TV show '24' really about?...

"Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel..."

Have you ever met a policeman who abused his authority?

Or a school teacher? Or a coach? Or a politician? Or a boss?

This is not exactly a new thing to us, is it? Put a uniform on someone and their character often seems to change. Give someone power over others, even if it's only in a tiny area, like appointing one student to lead a small group of others, and they may become perfect tyrants. I have even known pastors to abuse their "power." But what is God doing, making us watchmen?...

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!"

Have you ever tried to plan a party, but no one could come?

• The siblings couldn't agree on a date for a family reunion.
• The office staff couldn't find a date for a Christmas party.
• The weekend of your child's birthday didn't work out for his friends.

What a bummer. When you had food purchased, and the house was clean, and the plans were made, but then your guests called to say, "Hey, something came up." It makes for a very depressing evening...

...as I have oftentold you before and now say again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame...

Um... This is not P.C. Definitely not politically correct, or even polite! I mean, we just do not talk this way, do we?

I am afraid that if Paul were a pastor today he would be given that ultimate label of failure in our society... "hater." We like to say that those whom the Bible calls immoral are simply making different lifestyle choices. And those who believe different things about God just have "another perspective on the truth."

There is, however, one small problem for us to get past. How do we explain Paul's tears?...

As soon as Jeremiah finished telling all the people everything the Lord had commanded him to say... "You must die!... This man should be sentenced to death because he has prophesied against this city."

A bumper sticker you would never see on anyone's donkey in Jerusalem, "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." Jeremiah (and 600+ years later, Jesus) simply point out the sins of the people of Jerusalem, and their opponents say, "You must die!"

In our country it's popular to criticize the government, or even the entire populace. But only for certain things...

We're all looking forward to seeing the mural that is being created for our worship service at the school. If you're not familiar with this project, it will be a very large mural on the south wall of the gymnasium. It will show the Apostle Paul preaching to the gentile philosophers in Athens and pointing them to the risen Christ. And it is a symbol of our ministry in Ann Arbor, preaching Jesus in the "Athens of the West."

Click 'more' to see a couple of shots of the mural in process...

A dear friend is attending the funeral of his father today. I woke up thinking about it.

Have you experienced a loss like that? Ten years ago, although I had been with dozens of grieving families, I did not really know what that was like. When I experienced that for myself, I discovered that my faith was indeed the comfort I knew it would be - and which I had always preached about. But I also found out there is more to grief than the pain of facing death...

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil...

I've fielded a lot of questions over the years from people who want to know if Jesus *could* have sinned - and if he could not then was it really a temptation to him? For that matter, many people seem to think that Satan's approach is so obvious that it hardly constitutes temptation. After all, they can't imagine themselves being seriously tempted to bow down to the devil or to jump off a tall building.

But the real question at the heart of this is, what is temptation?...