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This is the seventh and concluding post of my Holy Week Meditations for 2012. Please click here for the archive list of posts. Annette and I, as well as the staff here at Desert Stream Ministries, wish you a deeply blessed Easter. He is Risen! — Why was Mary Magdalene the first disciple Jesus entrusted with His resurrection? According to John’s Gospel, Peter and John raced to the empty tomb but could not comprehend Christ resurrected. Both John the Beloved and Peter the Rock

Merciful Discipline 3: Broken, We Endure Shame In the Church, God has put Himself into hands that betray Him again and again. – Pope Benedict Do not hold against us the sins of the fathers; may Your mercy come quickly to meet us, for we are in desperate need. Help us, O God our Savior, for the glory of Your Name; deliver us, and forgive us our sins for Your Name’s sake. Why should the nations say, “Where is their God?” (PS 79:8-10a) We repent on behalf of the abuse-broken chu

— Father of Mercy for an Adulterous Generation 40 Days of Mercy Devotional – Lent 2012 – Day 2 ‘Apart from God, there is no contentment anywhere.’ (42) ‘They will come with weeping; they will pray as I bring them back. I will lead them besides streams of water, on a level path where they will not stumble, because I am Israel’s father, and Ephraim, my firstborn son.’ (Jer. 31:9) Make Your steadfast love known to us, O God. Let Mercy flow from us to unfaithful ones. How can we

— ‘In spite of everything, Jesus, I trust You in the face of every sentiment which sets itself against hope.’ (14) Imprisoned by hope: Zechariah expressed well the exile of the Israelites (Zech. 9: 11-12). Far from their land, subject to the cruelty of other masters and their gods, the holy nation hoped against hope for mercy. The prophet reminded them of the covenant of blood God had made with them—unchanging, Almighty Mercy. ‘Because of my blood covenant with you, I will fr

— ‘I Myself am fighting for them!’ (1516) Two streams of mercy converge in our God: His masculine, steadfast love which keeps covenant with us (hesed), and the deeply felt and tenderly expressed love that issues from His depths, as from the womb of a mother (rachamim). Truly we have a merciful Father whose love surpasses that of the most devoted parents! And like good parents, our Father expresses His mercy by battling for our best; He wars for our well-being. Knit in the wom

— ‘Apart from God, there is no contentment anywhere.’ (42) A painful fact of life for my twenty-something children is the sexually immorality that defines their generation. If not subject to parents who failed to keep their commitment to each other, they are steeped in a culture that celebrates the relentless erosion of holy boundaries. These are a people so scorched by porn they no longer feel the burn; these are ‘friends with benefits’, open to the sexual possibility in any

You could say that the way to Vineyard Anaheim had been paved in righteousness—we had been cast out of our home church for doing what was right, and God promoted us. Noble. How ignoble to discover a darker strain of sin in our own ranks. The hardship we endured in the first desert was a mere test run for the Sahara of our own making. Mercy met us facedown, seconds from death as a ministry. It seems that a longstanding staff person from Desert Stream had sexually abused at lea

Every Wednesday night for two years, we met in the home of a well-known interior designer. Charlie, along with many of his friends, was riding the first popular wave of gay activity on the West Coast. But after the disco and drug-induced orgies, these men and women cried out for mercy. Our pastor, Kenn, had introduced us to Charlie, a new convert at our burgeoning Vineyard Church. Annette and I would drive down Wilshire in her Voyager, with varying degrees of tension between

30-years ago, ‘Living Waters’ surfaced in West Hollywood. The burning ground of lust and sexual confusion became a pool of God’s mercy. Every Wednesday night for two years, we met in the home of a well-known interior designer. Charlie, along with many of his friends, was riding the first popular wave of gay activity on the West Coast. But after the disco and drug-induced orgies, these men and women cried out for mercy. The Vineyard Christian Fellowship had just sprung up on t

A couple of weeks ago my good friend Peter Kockelman and I had the privilege of proclaiming the truth of God’s mercy to transform His broken image in humanity—right in the middle of the Castro, arguably San Francisco’s (and the country’s) most notorious gay district. After the church service, we ate in a restaurant of mostly gay clientele. Among them was a young man, sitting alone, desperately seeking the attention of other men. He looked in earnest, awaiting some masculine s