Tommy Mann

What was David’s grave sin? You know what I’m talking about, that terrible thing he did that brought so many negative consequences for his family. Hint: it involves Bathsheba and Uriah.   Most of us are familiar with the account of David’s lust and subsequent defilement of Bathsheba, and then his dastardly plot to cover it up, which culminated in the murder of her husband Uriah. It is a terrible story, and certainly the low point in David’s life. You may well have answered the question of what was David’s grave sin by saying adultery, lust, murder, selfishness, or something else along those lines.  And that is true, for David is guilty and without excuse. But when he was confronted by Nathan the prophet, Nathan framed the sin as an affront against God first and foremost. He didn’t pull any punches. In 2 Samuel 12:9 he bravely asked the king, “Why have you despised the word of the LORD, to do what is evil in His sight?”   One verse later he said David’s impending punishment would be “be

Do you know your spiritual gifts? I remember taking spiritual gift inventory assessments when I was younger, a tool to help Christians identify and utilize their gifts from the   Holy Spirit. Four places in the New Testament list a total of about twenty different spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 12:28, Ephesians 4:11-12, Romans 12:6-8, and 1 Peter 4:10-11).    Something that jumps out at me when I read these four lists is that they are not uniform; some gifts appear more than once, while others do not, and some (I believe) are not in use today. I don’t believe, then, that we need to be so rigid about what the gifts of the Spirit are; there may be other gifts not necessarily listed, like those who use their giftedness with technology in the church. Consider what we read about the construction of the tabernacle in Exodus 35:   The Lord “has filled [Bezalel] with the Spirit of God, with skill, with intelligence, with knowledge, and with all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work

  The Bible calls us to show love. Jesus Himself said loving God and loving our neighbor constitutes the two greatest commandments. We might become tempted to make a list of people we are supposed to love, and then keep a separate list of people we don’t actually have to love. But the author of Hebrews did not give us that option.   Notice what he says in 13:1-2: “Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”    This brotherly love, as some will recognize, is  philadelphia  in Greek, where the famous city in Pennsylvania (the city of brotherly love) derives its name. It is a combination of two words, and it literally means love from the same womb. The author told the Hebrews to love all those from the same womb. Because they were all Jews, they were each descended from the womb of Sarah, the matriarch of Israel. There is a clear call to love their fellow countrymen.    Extended out, we can apply this to