The conference ministry tent is typically regarded as a spot to make connections, kill time, or scrounge empty calories. What I found out is how the ministry tent is an unexpected gold mine for Gospel proclamation.
We can see this as a foreshadowing of how the LORD always comes to His people—the people do not come to Him. So, it is God who sent His Son to us, His Promised One, up close and personal.
But it is not always helpful to create tidy categories of good and bad and to say, “Stop being ‘a Martha’ and do a better job of being ‘a Mary.’” That is a dangerous sermon to preach. In doing so, we can fall into the very thing we see Martha doing.
What might be a unique challenge of this text is how our preaching of it might itself resonate with its mystery. It goes to a broader question: How can we retain a sense of the “mysterious” in our preaching of mysterious texts?
Happiness in Slavery. We continue to read and discuss the parable of the Grand Inquisitor, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s, The Brothers Karamazov. In this episode, the Grand Inquisitor details why Jesus’ rejection of Satan’s temptations in the wilderness doomed humanity.
[Because] of the relationship of presence the LORD has with His people, His holiness ‘gets on them,’ and, as a result, this is what their life now looks like because the holy LORD is their God.