“Lent, the liturgical year shows us, is about the holiness that suffering can bring. It is about bringing good where evil has been, about bringing love where hate has been. It is about the transformation of the base to the beautiful” (The Liturgical Year, 125). Let’s be honest—we aren’t fans of suffering. We prefer a…
To get stronger takes a lot of dedication and hard work. Improvement doesn’t happen overnight. There are a lot of similarities with growing in Christ. What is the hardest thing about being a Christian? In my experience, there are two answers, both equally difficult. The first is evangelizing, often called “witnessing”. The other is disciplining.…
Religious philosophy can lead one through logical deduction to the conclusion that belief in religion is the best choice. Along those lines, 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal is best known today for what is called “Pascal’s wager”, where he argued that belief in God is logical because we have far more to gain by believing…
Pastor Timothy Keller is a leading example of how faithful Christians should stand apart from the world even as we seek to transform it for God’s kingdom. What follows are two short excerpts from his Facebook page that seem appropriate for believers, and bear repeating: A Warning Against Online Mockery God sometimes mocks (Ps…
Pictured: The Valley of Gehenna today Part 3: Gehenna It is with a sense of irony that we finish our 3-part study on the biblical understanding of Hell shortly before Halloween and Dia de los Muertos. With All Saints’ Day being November 1st, one could argue it would be more appropriate to study the biblical…
Part 2: Hades The last article discussed the use of sheol in the Old Testament. The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Septuagint) translates sheol with the Greek word Hades. Obviously, the intended meaning of the word doesn’t change with the translation, so whatever particular meaning we derived in the last article regarding sheol…
Part 1: Sheol Sheol is the Old Testament Hebrew word for death or the underworld. The word sheol appears 63 times, with the vast majority of those being in Psalms, Isaiah, Proverbs, and Job. Trying to figure out what the various Old Testament writers believed about sheol is complicated to say the least. How sheol…
The following article was written by Philip Kosloski and published on https://aleteia.org on 17 December 2017: Each color has a unique meaning that points beyond itself. Throughout the Church’s liturgical year, priests wear several different color vestments. The colors are not arbitrary, but reflect a deeper meaning that is meant to point us to a…
We recite the Ten Commandments every Sunday at Epworth, so we clearly think they are important, but how do we apply them to our lives today? For example, do we keep the Sabbath holy in a different way today because part of Sabbath restrictions were cultural for Israel, or do we not keep the Sabbath…
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA On occasion, some may wonder why the sermons at Epworth are always based on one (or more) of the assigned readings from the lectionary. Why not let the Minister choose the texts for preaching? Or why not preach sequentially through the Bible or various books…