Amos 5: 1-7 Summary: Amos ministered in a time of great religiosity but very little real relationship with God. The people’s lives were marked by empty religious ritual and rampant social corruption that was particularly cruel to the poor. God reveals through Amos that he hates religion without transformation…religion that...

Joel 2:12-32 Summary: Joel opens by describing a devastating locust invasion. His ministry is to explain to God’s people why this has happened. In short, the destruction of the locusts is a picture and warning of the ultimate destruction that will come upon Israel on judgment day if they do...

Hosea 2:2-23 Summary: Hosea’s most distinctive feature is not only that he uses the metaphor of adultery to describe sin, but that his very own marriage to an unfaithful wife, Gomer, becomes a living picture of Israel’s infidelity to God…and a picture of what sin does to the heart of...

Genesis 16

Luke 5:1-11 & John 21: 1-14

Ephesians 3:14-21

2 Corinthians 3:7-18 Summary: Not the most straightforward of passages, Paul is talking here about how God progressively revealed his glory in history; first with the law of Moses and then through the incarnation of Christ (the glory of the law being ‘set aside’ for the ‘greater glory’ revealed in...

Luke 24:13-35 Summary: To these devastated disciples who had lost all hope that Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus could have revealed himself in a dazzling display of resurrection glory. Instead, he chose to make himself known to them through relatively ordinary means: by explaining the scriptures and in the breaking...

Genesis 11:1-9 Summary: The confusion of languages at Babel is often thought of exclusively in terms of judgment. And it is. However, read in the light of Genesis 1:28 and 9:1 (God’s command to fill the earth), it is also a means for accomplishing God’s purpose. An array of cultures...

Ephesians 1:15-23 Summary: At the heart of Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians is his desire that their hearts would catch up to their heads–that they would grasp more deeply the hope and inheritance that belong to them in the gospel. Coupled with this prayer is an extended discussion on the...