A place for you.

  These two chapters record an array of miracles performed by Jesus including cleansing a leper, healing a centurion’s paralyzed servant, Peter’s mother-in-law, casting out demons, subduing instantly the wind and waves that created a tempest on the sea, making blind men see and a man who was mute to speak.  But the pinnacle of His work recorded here is a girl restored to life.  A summary statement about all these compassionate acts of Jesus is found in verses 16…

  This passage contains the famous “Sermon on the Mount” spoken by Jesus.  But we have to go back to Matthew 4:23-25 to see who the crowd is to whom Jesus preached.  They are the “multitudes” who had heard about the “healing all kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease among the people.”  They all either need a miracle of healing themselves or know someone who does for whom nothing else has worked.  They may even have carried someone…

  This amazing opening to the New Testament contains so many important things!  We are familiar with most of them.  But if there is a part of this beginning to the gospel we pay the least amount of attention to, it is surely the very first part of it, the geneaologies.  Closer examination of these and those in Mark’s gospel show that Matthew was establishing the legal ancestry of Jesus and Mark his bloodline.  That is consistent with what is…

                  “Try offering them to your governor! Would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you?” says the Lord Almighty.” — Malachi 1:8                 God is our greatest authority. We would not give our earthly authorities our scraps. Yet so ­often we offer God the leftover portions of our time, money, energy, thought, and emotion. He gets the scraps and rejects—just as the Israelites were offering the worst of their animals in sacrifice. It must have been a…