As we turn the bend on Thanksgiving and head into Christmas, I want to get you to begin prayerfully meditating on the study I would like to take us through in December. Since I am a “visual thinker” and a graphic artist by trade, it only follows that I have the artwork finished before anything else. Friends will not find that a surprise. For several weeks now, however, I have been thinking about what we might, as a group, study together through the holidays. Then, about a week ago, I felt as if God definitively gave me clarity and inspiration as an answer. After ascending the 4 flights of stairs to the roof of the garage where I park my car everyday in downtown Annapolis, I stopped to marvel at the awesome sight in front of me. The domes of the State House and the Naval Academy Chapel played bookends to a city skyline perfectly silhouetted against a star-filled nighttime sky.As I stood there, coat drawn tight around me with my hands deep in the pockets, I mused that it looked almost like a middle-eastern setting and that, perhaps, the cityscape of Jerusalem was not too much different ...

If you study the New Testament to any degree of depth, over time you come to a pretty startling realization. The greatest dangers that the church faced from the time immediately following Jesus' ascension until the composition of the NT were internal issues. This does not mean that paganism, atheism or governmental persecution were not legitimate fears, just that they did not rank in lethal effect with things like false teachers and heresy. Think about this. Where did Jesus level almost all of his criticism? Almost 100% of the time it was directed towards those within the Jewish faith, those that claimed to be followers Yahweh. And Paul's warnings throughout the NT to his churches can best be summarized by his wisdom to the elders of the church in Ephesus at his departure. "Be shepherds," he tells them because "savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock." Continuing on, he emphasizes, "even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth..." Many people miss the danger of heresy. It is not an absolute foreign and competitive philosophy to Christianity as are false religions like Scientology or Kabala. Instead, heresy is exactly as Paul described it ...

History is about to repeat itself, or at least partly so. Once again a massive hurricane, this one named 'Gustav,' is bearing down on New Orleans. Having lost only an ounce of strength from brushing Cuba, Gustav is presently a CAT 3 storm and will definitely regroup back into a CAT 4, if not CAT 5 before making landfall. The projected "Ground Zero" region by the National Hurricane Prediction Center? Louisiana. The reason that it is not a complete replay of the Katrina disaster is that this time the state officials are not taking chances. With images of floating bodies, burning homes and mass confusion still vivid in their memories, officials are sounding the alarm early. The CNN website's frontpage headline reads "Get your butts moving!" That quote, in context, is from Mayor Ron Nagin who was the mayor when Katrina rolled through. His exact words were, "You need to be scared. You need to be concerned, and you need to get your butts moving out of New Orleans right now. This is the storm of the century." I would like to suggest that Nagin's got it right this time. Having worked ...

Bathisms?  Seriously? Well, yes.  The core concept for the name “Think Depth” comes from my understanding of Luke 6:46-49.  This is Luke’s account of the famous parable where the two men build houses but upon different foundations.  One built his upon rock, the other upon sand.  Or at least that was how the Sunday School rhyme I learned as a kid taught me the story. Thanks to flannelgraph theology, I always pictured the story alongside a main coastline which is a micture of sandy beaches and rocky outcrops.  Thus, one house was up on the rocks and the other was down on the beach.  The fact that the man would actually build a house down on a beach was a ludicrous notion which even at the age of 7 I understood.  After all, I had done my share of sandcastle building at that age. When you study the passage, though, you find that this is not the reality of the story.  In fact, the two men probably are building their houses right next to each other on the exact same type of ground.  The difference, acording to Luke is that one man takes the time to “dig down deep” and find bedrock before ...