Posts by Tyler Dirks

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The Eternal Appetite of Infancy

by Tyler Dirks

The Holy Spirit told me, “So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation—if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.” And then the Holy Spirit said, ““Behold, I […]

Family Drama & Dysfunction

by Tyler Dirks

The church is a dysfunctional family. There is no escaping some degree of drama. Drama and dysfunction are like bad weather. You can build houses and structures that keep the elements out, but the weather is still battering the house, and you yourself cannot always avoid it (e.g. like when you are coming home from […]

Switchbacks

by Tyler Dirks

The best sermon ever preached didn’t happen in a sanctuary …it happened on a mountainside (Matthew 5:1). Jesus loved being on mountains (Matthew 14:23; 15:29: 17:1; 28:16). Mountains are metaphors for the most edifying experiences of life. The rigors of acclimatizing to altitude, the perseverance required to hike, the problem solving required to climb, the […]

Grown Up “Greatness”

by Tyler Dirks

What makes someone truly great? What is the zenith of wisdom and maturity? Who should we esteem and celebrate as the most distinguished and exemplary people on the planet? Or to put it another way… what if God Himself were to appoint a group of people to positions of prominence and authority? What should they […]

Rahab

by Tyler Dirks

Who is on your TOP 5 list of people you’d like to grab a beer with and chat? Rahab the prostitute is on my TOP 5 list! And Joshua the son of Nun sent two men secretly from Shittim as spies, saying, “Go, view the land, especially Jericho.” And they went and came into the […]

Primary Stuff for Philemon, Onesimus, Barney’s Cousin & Others

by Tyler Dirks

I was imaginatively inhabiting Paul’s letters to the people in Colossae this morning. Philemon lived in Colossae! So when you imaginatively immerse yourself in Paul’s letter to Colossae you must also diligently envisage the rigors and jubilation of Philemon’s relationship with Paul and Onesimus! Moreover, the Laodicea community was 20km down the road from Colossae, […]

Incarnation Ink Invasion

by Tyler Dirks

Here’s the deal. God made the world, and then we said, “We’ll take it from here!” Things got bad. Shockingly, God didn’t give us the silent treatment. He mercifully gave us His Word! So we decided to become scholars of God’s Word. Not so much practitioners, but definitely scholars. We accumulated religious information, and we […]

Feelings

by Tyler Dirks

Here’s a quotation from our friend Eugene about feelings… “My feelings are important for many things. They are essential and valuable. They keep me aware of much that is true and real. But they tell me next to nothing about God or my relation to God. My security comes from who God is, not from […]

Please Ponder

by Tyler Dirks

I ran across this small batch of quotations from our good buddy Eugene this morning. I now share them with you bloggy-blog readers, and I exhort and encourage you to mull them over for a minimum of 7 seconds 7 reps. “The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing something before I know […]