outWORD by Matte Downey

Image from steppingstonefriendswood.com When you go to a financial adviser, they ask you three basic questions in order to discern how best to handle your investments. 1. What is your goal? (retirement, simple and sustainable lifestyle, travel, funds for children's education, etc.) 2. What is your timeline? (5 years, 20 years, 50 years) 3. What is your tolerance for risk? (are you willing to take chances? how do you handle setbacks? volatility?) When we think about investing our lives in the kingdom of God, of living a life of faith, the same kind of questions apply. What do we desire or love? What are we pointing our lives toward? Do we frame things short-term or long-term? What foundation we are laying for future generations? How do we respond to hard times? Do we experience a significant amount of fear and paranoia or are we willing to take risks? Does our perspective take into account the long arc of redemption and grace found in Jesus? When Jesus tells his listener...

Image from @Sign_Craft We talk about the kingdom of God as having come (Jesus declared as much), as being present, and as still to come. In the first chapter of Revelation, the Almighty One describes himself as "who is, who was, and who is to come." So closely is the kingdom of heaven related to the king of glory that when you see one, you see the other. Both king and kingdom encompass the realms of past, present, and future. If our theology emphasizes one of these aspects to the neglect of the others, we end up with some pretty lopsided doctrines such as cessationism, over-realized eschatology, or gospel escapism. I won't take time to unpack any of these (perhaps in a future blog) because my point here is that our personal spirituality, like our theology, can get a bit off-kilter if we do not invite God and God's kingdom into our past, our present, and our future. In the context of living in the kingdom, our past refers to that which we cannot change. It is our...

I am not a big history fan. This can be a bit challenging when so much of what I am studying, especially this term, has to do with history. Some of my colleagues love the adventure that comes with a sense of the past, and historical details come easily to them. I tend to struggle a bit more with this linear way of looking at the world and have to make an effort to grasp the bigger picture. But there are other things I do see quite well, like the human element present in history and the impact of interesting personalities in our world. This is because I am basically a PRESENT person. If you are a PAST person, you tend to think about what has happened. On the plus side of this, you would make a great history professor and can handle a great deal of information and detail about events with relative ease because the past is important and interesting to you. The past is also stable - it won't change - which, although it means that you can't alter it, also means that you are always ...