Dave Brisbin 11.14.21 There was something different about the way Jesus prayed. His friends watched him, watched other religious leaders. They saw their Jewish teachers praying in the marketplace or temple court in full view of the people, saw gentiles praying loud and long, entreating their gods over and over with petitions. Then they saw Jesus, after a grueling day teaching and healing, disappear into the hills sometimes for days, or wake to find him already gone, returning later with the ener...
Nov 14, 2021•48 min
Dave Brisbin 11.7.21 How do you measure your own righteousness? Kind of loaded word. Maybe “rightness” is better. Do you even think about your rightness spiritually? How you measure up, how you’re progressing, what God thinks of you? The religious authorities of Jesus’ day had it all worked out. They measured their righteousness in three ways: how much money they gave to the temple treasury, how much they prayed, and how often they fasted. Of course, they made sure everyone knew how much they we...
Nov 07, 2021•47 min
Dave Brisbin 10.31.21 Most of us realize we’re imperfect. Some of us are even willing to admit it. When Jesus tells us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, some of us are immediately off trying to follow every rule…perfectly. Some give up after a while, and others don’t even try. But if we’re going to take Jesus seriously, how can we be imperfect and perfect at the same time? Right before he tells us to be perfect, he tells us to love our enemies, because our Father causes the sun to...
Oct 31, 2021•47 min
Dave Brisbin 10.24.21 Jesus is not here to make us safe. Jesus is here to make us free. We can’t have both at the same time because freedom and security are inversely proportional—as one goes up, the other goes down. We give up freedom to feel safe, and the freer we are, the more exposed and vulnerable. Without Jesus’ priorities deeply set, we willfully miss his message in our obsessive desire for security. Jesus is always exposing and deconstructing the legal walls we build for security at the ...
Oct 24, 2021•43 min
Dave Brisbin 10.17.21 Is texting OMG—shorthand for oh my God—taking the Lord’s name in vain? Blasphemous, unlawful? Many Christians will answer yes and yes. But a group of Jewish high school students said they just use it instead of an exclamation point and don’t feel God is involved at all, that OMG stands for oh my gosh anyway. Now gosh and golly have been polite euphemisms for God since the 1700s—can’t expect high school students to know that. Those who answer yes and yes will say that OMG br...
Oct 17, 2021•41 min
Dave Brisbin 10.10.21 Nearly thirty years ago, my fiancé and I asked our Pastor if he would marry us. I can only imagine how our faces looked when he said no because we’d both been married before, and he didn’t know that we had the biblical justification for our divorces. The church’s reading of Jesus’ sayings on divorce and remarriage was that the only legitimate reason for divorce was adultery, without which any remarriage was an act of adultery as well. Already in church leadership and pastor...
Oct 10, 2021•44 min
Dave Brisbin 10.03.21 Stepping off stage after speaking, a woman leads another young woman by the hand who sees only the floor in front of her feet as they approach. The first asks if I would speak to her friend. Without meeting my eyes, she slowly tells of a friend since childhood who married a Jewish man and converted to Judaism, then after a long depression had just committed suicide. She loved her friend very much and was afraid she was now in hell. Rejecting Christianity, committing suicide...
Oct 03, 2021•41 min
Dave Brisbin 9.26.21 Desperate for a different outcome, a mother asks me to visit her son in county jail on a drug charge. Visiting an inmate is much like the movies: huge sterile waiting space, walls an unnamable yellowish beige green, bolted down metal benches, stenciled black numbers over an endless wall of doors. Waiting. Lots of waiting. A flat male voice calling my name and two numbers. One for the door, one for the window. Through the door, long corridor with windows on both sides, bolted...
Sep 26, 2021•46 min
Dave Brisbin 9.19.21 Have you ever considered the power of your unconscious thoughts? Unconscious thoughts are like your bones. You cover your bones with muscle, skin, hair, and makeup, but though you never see them, it’s all about the bones. Your bones create your true form. Unconscious thoughts, core beliefs we have accepted since childhood, assumptions about life that family, education, and culture have hammered down are the skeletal structure on which everything we think we know hangs. Uncon...
Sep 19, 2021•41 min
Dave Brisbin 9.12.21 With two great metaphors, Jesus shows us the effect a person has on everyone near, once they have come to see life through God’s eyes. Salt and light. As modern Westerners, salt makes no sense until we look back to see what it meant to ancient life before refrigeration and antibiotics. But light seems to make perfect sense right away. We think we know what Jesus means, which is probably worse. By thinking Jesus is only talking about the brightness and illumination, the goodn...
Sep 12, 2021•49 min
Dave Brisbin 9.5.21 In the poetic manner of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus starts by painting a portrait of the person who has become the Kingdom of Heaven…not entered or possessed it, but has actually come to embody God’s “reign,” God’s will being done on earth. His deepest purpose and pleasure: humility, connection, faithfulness—lived out in human form. Jesus then transitions to show us the effect such people have on the lives and communities around them with two of his most famous metaphors. ...
Sep 05, 2021•51 min
Dave Brisbin 8.29.21 Ever watch a movie where you were missing every third word, maybe because of accents, fast dialog, or low volume? At first you listen harder. Then your mind tries to make meaning by contextually stitching the edges of what you did hear together. Eventually you just give up and watch something else. This is essentially what happens when we read ancient scripture and especially the teachings of Jesus concentrated in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s not that we don’t have the righ...
Aug 29, 2021•53 min
Dave Brisbin 8.22.21 Remember those Russian nesting dolls? Matryoshka dolls, one inside the other, smaller and smaller, but each containing the whole doll. In terms of Jesus’ teaching, the Bible is like this: open the Bible and find the New Testament, and inside that, the gospel of Matthew. Inside Matthew is the Sermon on the Mount, and inside the Sermon, the Lord’s Prayer. Each one smaller, but containing the whole. If you were stranded on the proverbial desert island with just the Sermon on th...
Aug 22, 2021•48 min
Dave Brisbin 8.15.21 Some six hundred years ago, in what has become a classic of Western spirituality, the anonymous English author of The Cloud of Unknowing is trying to show us the only way we can approach God: “No one can fully comprehend the uncreated God with knowledge, but each one, in a different way, can grasp him fully through love.” This love, understood as pure presence and connection, can only be experienced in the silence beneath words and the rational thought that speaks them. But ...
Aug 15, 2021•50 min
Dave Brisbin 8.8.21 Have you ever thought of Jesus of Nazareth as a poet? I just asked a roomful of attendees on Sunday morning and got no takers. Truth is, we were not taught and don’t think of Jesus as poet. Jesus remains more or less an extension of ourselves: sharing enough of our values, attributes, and worldview to be comfortable. Truth is, Jesus was outrageously uncomfortable to his own people; how much more should he be to us? The Sermon on the Mount, probably used as a catechism for the...
Aug 08, 2021•50 min
Dave Brisbin 7.25.21 What’s the most important verse in scripture? That could be endlessly debated and ultimately impossible to answer unless asked this way: what is the most important verse in scripture to you? And once it becomes personal, it most likely becomes a moving target as well. Different verses have been signatures for me, changing over time, and recently, Luke 23:34 has been persistently growing in importance: Forgive them, Father, they don’t know what they are doing. Not particularl...
Jul 25, 2021•45 min
Frank Billman 7.18.21 We all have those times in our lives when we get hit hard with tragedy or difficult life events. Sometimes they come in waves and leave us breathless and wondering how to even begin to process them or move forward. In those difficult times we can find ourselves getting overwhelmed by sadness, despair, grief and depression. So how do we deal with this? How do we find our hope and our connection with God? It takes a conscious choice and action that is often uncomfortable in o...
Jul 18, 2021•38 min
Dave Brisbin 7.11.21 We are fast on track to becoming a post-Christian country. Recent stats show that only 36% of the youngest among us, Millennials and Gen Z, have any church membership as opposed to Boomers at 58% and those born before 1946 at 66%. There is a generational changing of the guard, and for the first time, less than half the population are members of a church. Only one in three self-identified Christians actually attends church, and between four and seven thousand churches are clo...
Jul 11, 2021•51 min
Dave Brisbin 7.4.21 Fourth of July, 2021. 245th anniversary of what? Start of the revolution? Birth of the US? Signing the Declaration of Independence? The revolution started a year before, the Constitution wouldn’t be adopted for another twenty, and the Declaration wasn’t fully signed until the following year. But on July 4th, 1776, the rough draft of the Declaration was approved by congress...we like our history neat and tidy, but truth is messier. Jesus was a revolutionary too. When did his r...
Jul 04, 2021•45 min
Dave Brisbin 6.27.21 A priest says that some of the most egotistical people he knows are clergy. A friend asks why people who believe in a loving, abundant God are not living happy, healthy, abundant lives. Digging down, the reasons are related. True transformation is the merging of enlightenment and maturity, our state of consciousness and our stage of consciousness. The two are connected, but not the same. We can gain insight, understand deep, spiritual principles long before we have the matur...
Jun 27, 2021•44 min
Dave Brisbin 6.20.21 What does everything we experience in life teach us about life? What does everything that our fathers, our culture, and institutions demand from us show us about the way life works? That any approval we receive is always based on performance? That the basis of life is legal and transactional? That not only is there no free lunch, there are only so many lunches to go around, and we must fight for finite resources if we want to survive. In other words, life teaches us a scarci...
Jun 20, 2021•44 min
Dave Brisbin 6.13.21 As good Westerners, we approach spiritual formation with our minds. We see faith as correct thinking, a mental agreement with correct thoughts about God, theology, doctrine. But over the years, I’ve learned not to trust thoughts in my head. I know at best, they are incomplete and inaccurate more often than I’d care to admit. But this is no longer cause for concern: I don’t expect my thoughts to be complete and accurate anymore, and I don’t need them to be. When it comes to s...
Jun 13, 2021•42 min
Dave Brisbin 6.6.21 Jesus said that no one can see Kingdom—the quality of life lived in awareness of God’s presence—until born again in spirit. In the same breath he says those born of spirit are like wind, which you can hear but never see or know where it’s coming from or going to. Not very helpful if you’re trying to get there. And that’s the point. Spirit can’t be controlled. The more we try to control it, the more we deny its presence. There is spiritual work, but that is about subtraction, ...
Jun 06, 2021•52 min
Dave Brisbin 5.30.21 Two questions last week: How do we come to know God, see life as the Father sees it? And how is Jesus the only way to the Father? Great questions, and related—two parts of the same question. Knowing God is central in scripture, but knowing in the Hebrew minds that wrote scripture was not intellectual; it was intimate experience. To them, knowing God couldn’t be separated from the process of experiencing intimacy. Jesus’ Way is the process of experiencing God, seeing our live...
May 30, 2021•44 min
Dave Brisbin 5.23.21 Jesus says that if we believe in him, we will do the works he did and greater works than those. Most commentators say that those works are Jesus’ miracles and the greater works are not in quality but quantity—that Jesus’ followers had more time to do more works for more people. But the bible is a spiritual book conveying spiritual truths and principles, and if we take it too literally, we can miss its primary points. Of all the works Jesus did, what did he primarily do? Ask ...
May 23, 2021•45 min
Dave Brisbin 5.16.21 Imagine living in a world where you didn’t understand the workings of nature…where thunder, lightning, earthquakes, eclipses were literally the voice, hands, and face of God? Where impossibly dark nights exploded with stars and the only entertainment were the chants, drums, and dance around community fires at night. Where you never saw your own reflection in a mirror and only knew the faces of those around you? How would you experience life and identity in such a world? Slow...
May 16, 2021•55 min
Dave Brisbin 5.9.21 Mother’s Day. A few years ago I was asked: I know God loves me, but how do I know he likes me? Made me smile immediately, as it cut right to the heart of things. Love can means so many things to us, but like is pretty specific—implies affection, genuine delight, pleasure, desire to be with, playful attention, fun. God’s love may hold the fabric of the universe together, but God’s like is what makes us feel loved. Knowing we are liked is one of our most basic needs and is usua...
May 09, 2021•47 min
Dave Brisbin 5.2.21 What kills our ability to trust our lives to the action of unseen spirit? Our fears, of course. We fear death because of the ultimate unknown it represents: whether anything we imagine ourselves to be continues. We fear God’s judgment and hell because we’ve been taught to look at God legally and hell literally. But that is not what Scripture teaches. Corrected by context, Scripture presents a heavenly God, connected, always unbalancing the scales of justice in favor of the be...
May 02, 2021•47 min
Dave Brisbin 4.25.21 I’ve been getting a lot of questions about death lately. Things seem to come in cycles, and this apparently is that cycle. In the past week, I was asked about death from an eighteen-year-old girl and a sixty-eight year old man, so it’s on all our minds. What happens at death? What happens after death? What does the bible say about death? But between all the questions, what is it we really want to know? The central, mother of all questions? We want to know whether we continue...
Apr 25, 2021•39 min
Dave Brisbin 4.18.21 Have you always worked for a guaranteed, monthly or hourly salary or have you worked freelance or project-to-project or owned your own business? If you’ve done both at various times, you know how different the experiences are. Working for a salary makes life much more manageable, predictable and smoother than always wondering where the next job or customer is coming from, storing reserves when business is good to cover when it’s not. But the predictability of a salary is als...
Apr 18, 2021•51 min
