Matt Deseno is the founder of multiple award winning marketing businesses ranging from a attraction marketing to AI appointment setting to customer user experience. When he’s not working on the businesses he teaches marketing at Pepperdine University and he also teaches other marketing agency owners how they created a software company to triple the profitability for the agency. Our Sponsors: * Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.com * Check out Mint Mobile: https://mintmobile.com/tmf * Check out Moorings: https://moorings.com * Check out Warby Parker: https://warbyparker.com/travis Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy…
Luke 4:31-44 The blueprint of the household of God looks nothing like the blueprints of our own cultural and social cliques. If we want to know how to embody the household of God, we need look no further than to Jesus. While on earth, Jesus modeled this new reality by connecting with every type of person around - conservative theologians, liberal theologians, prostitutes, divorcees, children, politicians, people who party hard, military servicemen, women, lepers, ethnic minorities, celebrities, and so forth - and inviting them to be part of his group and to work together to bring wholeness to their cracked and crumbling world. - Christena Cleveland, Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces that Keep Us Apart…
Luke 4:16-30 Many and varied are the interpretations dealing with the teachings and life of Jesus of Nazareth. But few of these interpretations deal with what the teachings and life of Jesus have to say to those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs against the wall.... This is a matter of tremendous significance, for it reveals to what extent a religion that was born of a people acquainted with persecution and suffering has become the cornerstone of a civilization and of nations whose very position in modern life has too often been secured by a ruthless use of power applied to weak and defenseless peoples. - Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited…
Luke 4:1-15 (formatted as poetry) There is not a place in this world where I am not asked to prove it./ Substantiate my belonging./ Verify that my body is qualified to occupy this space,/ as if the miracle of my enfleshment weren't enough./ But I am asked to be superhuman. Divine even. More than mediocre,/ like the rest of them,/ to demonstrate that my placement on this earth is not the mere result of affirmative action./ But I will not eat the bread of your cunning. My sustenance is found elsewhere. -Drew Jackson, "Prove It" in God Speaks Through Wombs…
Luke 3:19-38 No person we meet from the moment we open our eyes in the morning till we shut them in sleep at night is finished. Each person is a tragic-comic soul whom God is saving. Implicit in every personal name (explicit in baptism) is the Holy Trinity, that intricate coming into being of persons-in-relationship in a not-to-be-fathomed eternity. - Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder…
Luke 3:1-18 "[John the Baptist’s message] is not good news in the sense that it will make everybody happy. It is not good news in the sense that whatever evil and injustice people have committed and still commit is no longer important. It is good news in the sense that a new reality is dawning. Thanks to the one whose coming John announces, evil and injustice will be undone...But it is not good news for those who thrive on injustice, whose power is oppressive and unjust. For them, the good news is first of all the possibility---and the need--- of what may well be a costly repentance.” Justo Gonzalez…
Luke 2:41-52 Spiritual transformation is not about behavior modification. It is about changing the sources of behavior, so the behavior will take care of itself. When the mind is right and the heart is right and the body and the soul and the relationships that we have in our social world are right, the whole person simply steps into the way of Christ and lives there with joy and strength. It is not a struggle. One of the lies about the spiritual life is that it is hard. No, no. It is not hard. It is the easy way. What's hard is the other way, and that is what you see when you look at the world. - Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence…
Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12 That hidden thing calling me on to the chase is the very thing that puts me in my place. It is at once invitation and caution—a burning bush beckoning and a warning that I’ve ventured onto holy ground... - Joshua Stamper, "Proverb"
Luke 2:21-38 This is what Christmas is all about - something radically new that cannot be generated out of the conditions of this world. It does not emerge. It comes. We do not extrapolate it. God promises it. If darkness has descended upon you and your world, you need not try to persuade yourself that things are not as bad as they seem or to search desperately for reasons to be optimistic. Remind yourself instead of a very simple fact: the light of the One who was in the beginning with God shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. - Miroslav Volf, Against the Tide…
Luke 1:26-38 "The Advent season should come as a reminder to us that we can never be, and should not be, adjusted to the world. We are here to proclaim the reality and the imminence of a wholly other world, a world in which different powers rule and different standards operate. We are here to make it possible for ordinary men and women really to believe this, and therefore to live in hope and readiness." - Lesslie Newbigin, The Good Shepherd…
Luke 1:1-25 "Before Advent is a word, it is a sigh. A voice crying. A mood. And never more deeply felt than in these troubled months. Advent marks both the exhaustion and the hope of God’s people, when the meaning of our lives is expressed in a weary exhalation of ordinary breath and then a sharp intake of something greater." - Richard Lischer, "Advent is a season of sighs, especially this year," (posted on The Christian Century, December 16, 2020).…
Rev 22:1-21 That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as news; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it news, and good news at that; though we are likely to forget that the word Gospel ever meant anything so sensational. - Dorothy Sayers, "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged"…
Rev 21:1-27 "[I]t is the very transcendence of God - in the ascension of the Son who now reigns from heaven, and in the futurity of the coming kingdom for which we pray - that disciplines and disrupts and haunts our tendency to settle for 'this world.' It is the call of the Son from heaven, and the vision of the new Jerusalem descending from heaven, that pushes back on our illusions that we could figure this all out, that we could bring this about." - James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King…
Rev 20:1-15 "For believers, the last judgment is not so much a process by which the moral quality of human deeds is made unmistakably manifest and appropriate rewards and punishments apportioned, but rather, and above all, an event in which sinners are forgiven and justified. Christ the final judge is none other than Christ the merciful savior." - Miroslav Volf, Against the Tide: Love in a Time of Petty Dreams and Persisting Enmities…
Rev 19:1-10 Am I a paragon of faith? (The honest answer is no.) While I once thought that I should labor to look and act and believe just like the other "successful" Christians in my life, I've been freed up by something Thomas Merton once wrote: "For me to be a saint means to be myself." Noth that godly person I greatly admire, but myself. I see now that I'm engaged in a creative, enlivening, one-of-a-kind work of God in me, redeemed by Christ for good things. Who knows what kind of saint I, as myself, am becoming? - Karen Wright Marsh, Vintage Saints & Sinners…
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