Tag: covenant

Culture

by Phillip Ross • August 3, 2010 • 0 Comments

Strategic Planning Organizational Model Values Culture SMART Goals SWOT Analysis Strategic Vision Mission & Values Objectives Strategies Action Plan Culture, sometimes called corporate culture, suggests the environment of predominating attitudes and behavior that characterize the functioning of a group or…

Grace, Not Luck

by Phillip Ross • August 2, 2010 • 0 Comments

Application Purpose Principle Passion Virtue Character Calling Leadership Grace Christ The business world mistakenly calls it luck or fortune. They commonly speak of being lucky or fortunate when things go well. Einstein knew better. He knew that “God doesn’t play…

Christ @ Work

by Phillip Ross • August 2, 2010 • 0 Comments

Application Purpose Principle Passion Virtue Character Calling Leadership Grace Christ The Foundation of All Truth The acceptance that anything at all can be true, that there is such a thing as truth and/or logic requires two things: 1) the acceptance…

Moral Decrepitude

by Phillip Ross • July 11, 2009 • 1 Comment

How do we get out of the mess of moral decay of American society generally, and in Marietta specifically? (Note: Marietta, OH, has recently been wracked with a sex & drugs crisis that has cost the jobs of several firemen…

Damanable Lies

by Phillip Ross • June 16, 2009 • 1 Comment

People can copulate, but only God can create life.

It’s Not The Sex, It’s The Integrity

by Phillip Ross • March 28, 2008 • 0 Comments

Elliot Spitzer was caught with his pants down. So, what’s the big deal. Sex is everywhere. Should we just get used to it? First, the fact that immorality is everywhere does not make it moral (right). Morality is not a…

Christ came to free people from bondage to the law of Moses, but not through the absolute abandonment of all law. Paulâ€™s training as a Pharisee made him the most biblically competent of the Apostles, which is reflected by his dominance as an author of the New Testament letters. My intention here is not to impose a foreign metanarrative upon the text, but to reveal the actual metanarrative of the Old Testament in the light of Christ as Paul presented it to the Galatians. That metanarrative was not what he had been taught as a Pharisee, nor what they had been taught by the Temple establishment. It was shockingly different, but it made undeniable sense of the Old Testament. The Temple establishment version was full of ancient mystery and symbolism that was difficult to understand, and cast the role of Israel as the hero of the story. Paulâ€™s version, on the other hand, was clear, simple, and practicalâ€”though it required the abandonment of much well-established Temple superstition. Paulâ€™s version cast the role of Jesus Christ as the hero.

While understanding the story of the Old Testament in the light of Christ is not difficult, abandoning our own false presuppositions about it requires some personal tenacity. Jesus continues to challenge our ideas about who we are and our role in history, Godâ€™s story. The story that Paul grew up with was the story about the importance and purity of the Temple. But the story that he learned from Jesus was about the corruption and failure of the Temple. Similarly, Christians today are Sunday-schooled in the importance of the institutional church, but the actual ongoing story in the light of Christ is about the corruption and failure of the church as an institution. In the following pages you will see that this story has played out over and again throughout history because of the pertinacity of sin.