Living spiritually is enhanced and enriched through the Psalms and their frequent affirmations of and appeals to God’s covenant loyalty. Many of these writings, however, may shock us with their realism. In the midst of our sometimes automatic pilot spirituality, where everything is supposedly bright and happy, some of the Psalms remind us that community with God and the path to life are far from straight forward. There is and will be brokenness, mystery, dark times, judgment, desperate searching, and much more. Though these circumstances frequently lead to illumination and new understanding, arriving there means going through—not taking a detour around—facets of spirituality that may not fit our desired schemes, notions, and expectations of God. The path may become difficult and the destination may seem far away, but God is faithful to lead us forward. The Psalms are a richly textured slice of life with God, and they offer us revelatory insights into humanness and living spirituality. From my Living Spirituality: Illuminating the Path.
Dr. Gregory J. Laughery
God has given us precious creational and salvific rhythms to live. Order and beauty shape and frame the world, while the death and resurrection of Christ extends reality and brings it into an entirely new dimension. These rhythms shake, rattle, and roll us off our seats and in so doing invite us to take part in the groove. Imagine dancing to God’s rhythms and learning to keep time with his beat. Join in the Divine concert. Get the rhythms, get the rhythms, get the rhythms and gooo! Get the rhythms, get the rhythms, get the rhythms and gooooo!
Dr. Gregory J. Laughery
Western culture is saturated with idols. In our context, there’s no need for pagan temples or shrines to promote idolatry. Money, possessions, sex, the human image, and so forth are constantly dangled before us with the persuasive message – “you and what you have is what it’s all about.” Idolatry may portray itself as subtle, but it has radical implications for what and who we worship and value. There’s no place for being naive on this subject. Be aware, cautious, and critical, as the asymmetry between the living God of Scripture as Creator of the world and lifeless idols couldn’t be more sweeping and thorough. The total incompatibility here is vast and unbridgeable, which should give rise to careful thought about the risk of losing the reality of who we are and the presence of the God to whom we belong.
Dr. Gregory J. Laughery
As readers of the Genesis creation accounts today we must realize that we are foreigners to the text and its ancient Near Eastern context, which strikes as strange and unfamiliar, yet we are not excluded from engaging with its God, time, narration, and drama in a somewhat recognizable pattern. Refigured lives then become a real possibility for those readers who are grafted into the revelatory story of God’s sculpting in time, both through creation and the ever-present redemptive outpouring of love in Christ, which graciously offers us a place and a role on the stage of the cosmic drama still in progress. This poetic and theologically-loaded biblical world production not only includes a narrative concordance that supersedes discordance with respect to time or changing portraits of the actual world, but it also proclaims that life triumphs over death and will continue to do so throughout God’s ongoing story.
Dr. Gregory J. Laughery
God's way of reconciliation is configured in the death of the Crucified One, which results in not reckoning people's sins against them. God has done everything that there is to be done from his side in order for us to be reconciled. This "logos" of reconciliation has been downloaded into new covenant, which through God's initiation, is written on human hearts and not tablets of stone. But the absolutely massive context for all this is God’s reconciling the world to himself in Christ. God’s story is big – a mega-narrative going far beyond personal individualistic salvation, culminating in a new heaven and earth. If God is reconciling the world to himself in Christ, we are to be ambassadors of this reconciliation, as those through whom God makes his appeal to others.
Dr. Gregory J. Laughery
