David Peterson

They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness (Romans 2:15a NIV). Our souls are “constituted and formed”, as Luther says, to know God, in this case God in his law. I say God because there is no law outside and separate from God. This is a confession that human beings are fitted for their environment and so we can trust our sense that there is an oughtness to existence, a sense of an intentional order, a way we are meant to act. Intention, of course, implies an intender, a personal will behind the things we sense we ought to do. Everyone knows this, Luther says, and this knowledge “is aroused by the preaching of the Word, so that the heart cannot help confessing that we must, as the Commandments read, honor, love, and serve God, for He alone is good and does good not only to the pious, but also to the wicked” (St.L. III:1053). The great good news we have to proclaim, the thing people could not know except in this

No one expected it. There was no one, to my knowledge, who believed God would become human and identify with us in our misery. That, however, is the message of Lent. God entered our world to stand with us not against us. Lent is forty days because Jesus was forty days in the wilderness being tempted by the devil. This trial is a picture of his whole mission, shouldering the human condition, standing with us, not apart from us. At that time there was a community, where the Dead Sea scrolls were later found, that separated itself from the rest of the world. It saw the world as "us and them". The religious leaders who lived among the people still stood apart from the people and also thought in terms of "us and them". Jesus came and turned everything upside down. He said he came to set the world on fire. He was going to burn down all that set itself against God's true purpose. God is love, one of his disciples would later write. Another would say, Love bears a

"When we study it in detail … we discover what a book of JOY the New Testament is.”  "JOY is the distinguishing atmosphere of the Christian life" (William Barclay in Flesh and Spirit). I remember well my experience of surrendering my life to Christ at the age of 18. Before that, I was ignoring the faith I had as a child. I was focused on having a good time, but though my focus was on a good time I remember a profound emptiness I felt. Here I was, surrounded by a group of friends, doing all kinds of fun things, but inwardly, I was empty. I see this same emptiness in kids today. My experience of surrendering to Christ was one of coming to know an “inexpressible and glorious joy”, as Peter says (1 Peter 1:8 NIV). Giving myself over to faith brought a fullness where once there was emptiness and an undergirding strength to all of my life, as Nehemiah testifies (Nehemiah 8:10). The source of this joy was in believing, precisely as Peter says in 1 Peter 1:8. Giving myse

School begins August 7th. I can’t believe it! When I was a kid we were off from Memorial Day until Labor Day. Summer vacation felt like a lifetime! Now those were the days! With the return of school, our thoughts immediately turn to memories of reading, writing, and arithmetic. We remember days on the playground, special teachers we had, and good friends we made. No doubt, we also have memories of conflicts with other students and classes in which we struggled. School can be a mixed bag, some of it good and some of it not so good. One of the often unspoken aspects of school is the passing on of values. I say unspoken because we live in a time when the emphasis is on the multicultural nature of our country. Public schools have to walk the fine line of trying to pass on the generally-accepted values of hard work, discipline, honesty, compassion, etc. without imposing a particular belief system about the source of these values. This makes the job of the public school teacher very d

Somebody told me once, half in jest, that while the big houses are in MCCUTCHANVILLE the real money is in DARMSTADT. Now like I say, there was an element of jesting in what they were saying. No doubt there are people in Darmstadt who are overextended when it comes to their lifestyle and there are people in McCutchanville who are savers. They were alluding, however, to the long-standing German heritage of Darmstadt with its culture of debt avoidance and frugal living. I found that this remains the culture in Germany today. While preparing for our trip to Germany we were told cash is king over there because Germans generally avoid debt. There is an old word for living within one’s means and saving for the future, prudence. It is related to the word “wise”. It has to do with living in such a way that your actions lead to a better life. Now that my kids are grown and preparing for life on their own I’ve told them that if they begin saving now, investing while they’re young, they can have

They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts (Romans 2:15 NIV). To be human is to be immersed in life (in existence, in the reality around us). There is no God’s eye view from which we can stand and with pure objectivity observe reality. To be sure, we have gained much by our attempts to stand back and analyze reality. We’ve been doing this in various ways since the beginning of human existence. With the scientific revolution there came tremendous gains from our ability to analyze the natural world but with it also a false sense of our ability to be objective and an exaggeration of the role of detachment in knowing. Don’t get me wrong. I believe in reason. However, knowing involves more than our cognitive faculty. There is what the ancients called the heart, a faculty often ignored by moderns. What is “heart”? For the biblical writers heart refers to the whole person immersed in reality. It refers to the whole self, intellect, emotions and will. Significantly,

At the end of this month we’ll be marking forty days since our celebration of Easter. It was at that time that Jesus left his disciples and ascended into heaven. The disciples asked Jesus just before he left if he was now going “restore the kingdom to Israel” (Acts 1:6). They still had it in their minds that the messiah is supposed to bring in an earthly kingdom. Why is that? Well, the Old Testament speaks of a day when God’s kingdom will be all in all. There are sweeping promises of God’s reign and rule through his anointed one when injustice and oppression will cease. Even today many Jews reject Jesus as Messiah precisely because he did not bring in this reign of literal, physical peace on earth. There is the unusual case of Pinchas Lapide, a Jewish diplomat and historian, who accepts the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection and believes that Jesus is the Messiah of the Gentiles (non-Jews) but says that only the return of Jesus to rule on earth will show him to be the Jewish messiah.