Advent is a great season of the Church year, but, with all the distractions of the holiday season and planning for the new year, it's a hard season to keep well. But in those years when I do manage to 'keep it well', I find that it operates as a kind of month-long examination of … Continue reading A Glimpse of Kingdom Life: An Advent Reflection on Philippians 1.3-11
As I was brainstorming ideas for how I wanted to approach Advent this year, I stumbled across a question that stopped me in my tracks, on the late (and sorely missed) Christian writer Rachel Held-Evans' blog: When I wake up on Christmas morning, how will I be different? As Christians we believe that what we … Continue reading Signs of the Times: The Christmas Difference
I started this series on sin and salvation with a perhaps controversial suggestion: that we normalize sin — and specifically our own personal and corporate sins — not to minimize them, but in order to be able to talk about them and their impact more honestly. As a culture, so much of how we think … Continue reading Sin and the Fullness of Salvation
There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will … Continue reading Signs of the Times: An Advent Reflection on Luke 21.25-36
Over the past few weeks, I've been trying to broaden and deepen our understanding of sin and salvation by looking at the variety of metaphors the Scriptures use to describe them. While it wasn't really my intention for it to be an all-out attack on models of substitutionary atonement, since that is the dominant understanding … Continue reading Substitution – and more! – in Paul
Matthew Root 