As always, the Pharisees are trying to posture and corner Jesus with a challenging question. How does Jesus respond to their question about divorce? Contrary to what you might think, divorce was at pandemic levels in first-century Jewish culture. And sadly, more than 2,000 years later, here we are struggling with the same dysfunction and brokenness.

Read Matthew 19:1-6 (aloud in the group if meeting as a group). Then answer the questions that follow.Mr. Comers offers four reasons for marriage as it was originally intended by God: Friendship, Gardening (vocational partnership in the journey of life), Sex, and Family. There may be quibbles about some of the details that are found in the book, but overall these make good sense. In the book of Matthew, chapter 19, we read one example. The Pharisees — the religious teachers of the day — come to Jesus and test him. They ask him if it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife.

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The Q & A at the end was definitely not trauma-informed and one asker was told that wives can help their husbands’ “fight” against lust by giving them lots of sex. Mr. Comer lays a good foundation when he introduces love as both feeling and action. I think that Christians are sometimes fearful of feelings and are afraid to make positive comments about them. Here, caveats are provided, but feelings are affirmed as a good and necessary part of love. To be human is to have emotions. We were created to love, and emotions are a part of who we are. A note on the chapter on homosexuality: Read this chapter with a grain of salt. Yes, he says some very helpful and crucial things regarding homosexuality. I applaud him for being so bold to do so. However, he said some things that simply made me cringe (which tie to what I mention above); none more fatal than inputting the speculation that Jesus may have “lusted” after another man. Don’t let this keep you from reading the book though, this is only one chapter and there are a lot of good things said in it, but read. Some of the ways he described or referred to girls/women/his wife felt off-putting and disrespectful. I don’t agree with much of the interpretations of the Genesis account nor Ephesians 5 presented in this book. At one point he pulls from the old “chewed up gum” trope from purity culture about people giving pieces of themselves away until they are “hollowed out” shells with nothing left for their spouse. He also references the extra-biblical concept of “soul ties.”

Spektor has always been a jumble of contradictions: a classically trained, Russian-born pianist who toured with the Strokes, won over the Meet Me in the Bathroom crowd, turned a multisyllabic pronunciation of the word “heart” into an unlikely chart hit, and charmed everyone from Chance the Rapper to Bill de Blasio, who fêted her at Gracie Mansion in 2019. Her songs have sometimes been unfairly dismissed as precious or twee, but there has always been that undercurrent of dark humor (who else could pull off a rousing singalong about carbon monoxide poisoning?) coursing through their veins. Where does Jesus say marriage began? Why is this significant? Why does it matter? Junk Drawer TheologyFirst off, I think I hate JMC’s writing style. He overdoes the conversational style so much that it feels condescending. (Your readers are intelligent, John Mark. You don’t have to add so many parenthetical phrases to tell them how to feel.) But the tone wouldn’t bother me so much if he were preaching instead of writing, so I imagine listening to a sermon rather than reading a book and I get over it a bit. I know, I know: Don’t get too attached to the early live version. It’s an unspoken rule of pop fandom. Yet the song’s evolution reflects the guiding impulse on Spektor’s first album since 2016. Working remotely for the first time, Spektor recorded her parts in a converted church in upstate New York, while John Congleton produced the record from California. The songs are among her most memorable since the Begin to Hope/ Far era, yet there’s an occasional disconnect between the songwriting and the arrangements, which are pitched towards bombastic, widescreen gestures. Consider the few things that hit you from the video. If you’re meeting with a group to watch this video, refer to your notes and share around the group. Asking the wrong question For me, I found about the first half of the book to contain useful elements. The last half, although interesting to read the arguments for theologies of complementarianism and heterosexual-only marriages, it was something that I did not find useful otherwise. In the first century, they didn’t wash feet for symbolism. They washed feet out of sheer necessity. And it was a nasty job. One that was saved for the lowest of the low. The bottom of the barrel. Only servants. Only the lowest servants. It’s hard to even compare the job to something equivalent today.

Love Coaching is the second fastest growing profession in the world and currently the most popular. Why? Because it gives you the freedom to design your own career path, work as little or as much as you want, while getting tremendous rewards including creating a lucrative business, job satisfaction, personal growth and so much more! We are the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve. We were created “male and female.” We were set up to love. To absorb the love of God into our bloodstream and then to share it with another human being. This idea of Jesus as the model for how we are to love each other sounds docile and tame and cliché, but when we actually read about the life of Jesus, it’s stunning. Now that she has a family, she has “insane fantasies” about a day spent reading, playing piano and going for walks. “I’ve always felt time, even as a little kid,” she says. “I feel the weight of it: this is it. What a gift! What a responsibility! Things like mortality, myth, the hugeness of humanity, all of those existential things, they’re very present. I’m grateful for art but I will always end up choosing cuddling with my kids instead of running away to make art. That’s probably why I make a lot less of it.” That said, there were several good points that were made that did not rely on or connote gender roles or sexual orientations.It is in this context that Jesus steps into this space. He gets on his knees, takes off his outer clothes, grabs a bowl, and gets to work. Scrubbing. Cleaning. Washing. The disciples didn’t take this as a loving gesture. Read the story. They were outraged! It was wrong. Downright cruel. There was no way they were going to let their master — their rabbi — wash their filthy feet. Love. “Maybe you’re not finding it because you’re not defining it right.” That is one of my favorite lyrics from the rap group Beautiful Eulogy’s song Take It Easy. And I think it’s a true story for so many people today. Describe the different words for “love” in Hebrew. How are they different from or similar to our modern view of love? Before you watch the video, take time to dig into the following question. Think about how it relates to you as an individual. The invasion, like her father’s death, occurred after the album was finished, but you can hear the relevant emotions in the songs ( Becoming All Alone’s soaring plea of “Stay, stay, stay”; “bombing and shelters go together” in What Might Have Been), just as you can hear them in her most devastating song, 2009’s Laughing With: “No one laughs at God in a hospital/ No one laughs at God in a war.” She writes stories, not diary entries, and they are constantly renewed.