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Holy Spirit disruptions: Wait

Lynne Baab • Thursday July 22 2021

Some of Jesus’ disciples are terrified. Jesus has died, his body has disappeared, and some of the other disciples are saying they have seen him alive. The ones who haven’t seen him yet wonder if Jesus has become a ghost, and they don’t know what to do with their questions and strong sense of loss.

Then Jesus appears among them.

When they see him, he does look like a ghost to them, so Jesus asks them to touch him. He requests something to eat, affirming that he’s still living in a body. Then he teaches them from the Old Testament scriptures about the...

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Holy Spirit disruptions: Go/Wait

Lynne Baab • Friday July 16 2021

The Bible and Christian history are full of stories of God telling people to go somewhere. The command to wait is quite frequent, too. God’s word to us to go, as well as God’s instructions to wait, often come to us as a disruption.

Elizabeth Elliot (1926-2015) was a hero of mine when I was a young Christian. Early in my twenties, I heard her speak, and I was captivated by her description of the obedience that took her first husband, Jim Elliot (1927-1956), to a South American tribe to share the Gospel. Instead of becoming Christians, the people there killed him and...

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Holy Spirit disruptions: What if something being hard shows we’re doing it right?

Lynne Baab • Friday July 9 2021

The sermon at our church last Sunday focused on Jesus’ sending of the 12, two by two, to preach the Gospel, heal, and cast out demons (Mark 6:1-13). Our preacher talked about the opposition that Jesus encountered in Nazareth right before he sent out the disciples, an incident that prepared the disciples for their ministry. Our preacher mentioned that when we experience opposition, we so often think we have done something wrong.

That idea has been a big theme in my pondering for the past few weeks. In my family of origin, when something was hard, it meant that you were doing...

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Holy Spirit disruptions: We are God’s beloved

Lynne Baab • Tuesday June 22 2021

If you read your Bible, pray, fast, keep a Sabbath, or engage in other ways of drawing near to God, then God will love you more. Right?

Have you ever believed that? Does a part of you still believe it?

For six years in a row, March through May, I have taught a masters level course for Hope International University, a Christian university. The topic of the class is leading groups into communal spiritual practices. After a week of definitions of spiritual practices and categories, I spend the whole second week, one week of eight, on the motive for spiritual practices, and one...

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