Grains of Sand

He’d said it several times while He walked the dusty roads of Palestine. The kingdom of God is not an earthly kingdom, He told them. But somehow it’s really hard to wrap our minds around anything other than the “here-and-now.” It’s just so, well, immediate. In John 18, Jesus is standing before Pilate. The Roman governor assumes (thinking in the immediate like everyone else) that he holds in his hands the power of life or death over this rustic Rabbi from the backwater town of Nazareth. How can this man be a threat to Rome? The Jewish authorities want Him killed. Their inability to pronounce a death sentence over Him had them grinding their teeth and tearing out their beards. So they twist the charges a little to make it seem like this Jesus is looking to overthrow the Romans and make Himself king. Mind you, since the beginning of the Lord’s ministry there were lots of people who embraced Him because they thought that when He spoke of “kingdom,” overthrowing the Romans was exactly wha...

I accidentally grew three sunflowers in my balcony planter this summer. They were probably the result of some stray bird seed, but nevertheless there they were. In the beginning the sunflowers were quite pretty. But their beauty didn’t last long. Very quickly they petals began to dry up and turn brown. I wondered if the soil wasn’t deep enough for them or if they were lacking water. Then I realized that the death of one part of the plant was a natural part of the process that was bringing life to another part of the plant—the sunflowers seeds. As the petals died, the seeds were bring produced in the heart of the flower. I was reading John’s account of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4 this morning. When the disciples returned from hunting up some lunch, they discovered that Jesus had been busy doing ministry. They thought they had left Him to rest by the well. They were concerned. “ ‘Rabbi, eat something.’ But he said to them, ‘I have food to eat that you know nothi...