SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“How much time do we spend on social media, watching movies, attending concerts, and hanging out with our friends? If we can spend four hours attending or watching a football game, why is it so difficult to spend an hour or two attending worship? If we can spend two hours listening to a music concert, why do we complain that the sermons we hear are too long? And if the social media steal an average of two hours, or even up to six or nine hours for tweens and teenagers, why do

“God gave men and women a natural law within them—the ability to choose the good and avoid the evil—but they chose selfishness. Then God gave the law of Moses, and it too was broken. Great darkness falls upon the soul that is without the light of the commandments….Why was the law given then? Because Israel was transgressing what they knew of God's law through conscience and nature. So God put it in writing! The law was never a savior, but a tutor (Galatians 3:24) to convict I

“The law may be kept by obedience (Lv 18:5) and by faith (Dt 30:14). Obedience without faith cannot bring anyone to righteousness. Yet faith, even apart from the law, can bring a person to righteousness, because Jesus Christ supersedes the law.” (Orthodox Study Bible, Romans 3:21-22) “Reduce God’s revelation to law and we embrace rules and codes and narrowest of relationships with God, endless struggle with obedience. In a religion of pure obedience, God the Lord is defined a

“Some pious and confused souls torture themselves trying to establish their righteousness before God by arbitrary calculation. They turn their relationship with God into a matter of quantifiable reckoning and seek to accumulate as many good deeds, or “works,” as possible – as if these works will offset their sins and offenses and create a favorable balance sheet on the Day of Judgment (Mk 10:17-27). Saint Paul urges us to reject the idea of gaining a superior record of good w

“A confusing aspect of our Christian growth is that we can, sometimes even at the same moment, have a very peaceful, godly thought full of love for God and neighbor, and then have a terribly sinful and embarrassingly nasty thought. How can this be? If God is alive in us, how can such terrible thoughts keep appearing in our minds? How do we combat this? One unhelpful way to combat this experience of good thoughts followed by bad thoughts is to become angry with ourselves, thin

“Creation has a sacramental purpose: it reveals God….the…rejection of sacramentalism is the beginning of naturalism, or it at least opens the door to its possibility. It is also the beginning of a certain evacuation of the sacred as a presence in the world.” (Father Stephen Freeman, James K.A. Smith) “In the modern world, we have largely lost this sacramental way of looking at things. One of the reasons so many people become victims of disordered pleasures, such as drugs, imm

“ [‘For though He was crucified in weakness, yet He lives by the power of God. For we also are weak in Him, but we shall live with Him by the power of God toward you.’ (2 Cor 13:4]…This is a difficult passage which causes problems for many people. What is meant here by “weakness”? In Scripture weakness can refer to bodily illness, and it can also mean not being securely grounded in faith. But there is a third possibility, and that is what we find here. Weakness can mean perse

“The genealogy [Luke 3:23-38] follows Joseph's ancestry, even though Jesus was only supposed to be the son of Joseph but was in fact humanly descended from Mary only. This is explained in two complementary ways: (1) Joseph was a righteous man and would have married within his tribe—thus Mary and Joseph would have largely shared a common lineage; (2) Jesus was born to bring all mankind into adoption by the Father, and thus He affirms that a lineage of adoption is as binding an

“We will become whatever we focus on the most. The Israelites exchanged their glories (their Perfect You as image bearers of God) for the image of the golden calf, and we too can lose ourselves trying to be what we are not called to be (Exod. 32:4; Rom. 1:18–25). We become what we love, so we must learn to love our God by seeing his incredible piece of eternity inside of us.” (Robin Phillips) “Our culture champions the mind. We think of ourselves as far more brilliant than th

“Our reading [Romans 6:18-23] presents a different understanding of freedom than the view of our society. This contrasting perspective distinguishes between “freedom from” and “freedom to.” Our society’s view of freedom stresses “freedom from” restraint. In that release from bondage, we are free to make unrestricted choices. However, whenever we make a choice, we bind ourselves to its course of action and its consequences. We cannot be all and have it all. To choose one thing