I have a favourite apostle. There, I've admitted it and it feels like such a weight off of my chest. I don’t even know if I'm allowed to have a favourite. I've never heard anyone else ever speaking about having a favourite apostle. It's kind of a guilty pleasure, not unlike the fact that I liked listening to Abba back when I was a metalhead. Certainly not something you talk about in polite company.

My favorite apostle is Peter, or to use his full name Simon Peter. The first reason why he's my favourite should be fairly obvious if you know me. I am also called Simon Peter. Those of us with cool names have to stick together. A shared name is not the worst similarity to draw two people together, but there is another, more important reason: he inspires me.

Peter is an interesting fellow. I'm not going to go into a detailed character study here, but I do have a few observations. A casual examination of Peter's life and his time spent with Jesus shows us that he's a goofball ... certainly a lovable one, but still a goofball. That initial examination can leave you wondering why Jesus wasted his time on him. Nothing about the Peter we see in the gospels said cool headed leadership. He had some goofy ideas, said some goofy things, denied Jesus three times and had to be corrected hard on a couple of occasions. Knowing this about Peter, I find him comforting. He was absolutely not perfect, but the Lord continued to love him and work with him to guide him through his imperfections and out the other side as a powerful apostle with, yes, actual leadership skills. As an also not perfect kinda guy, I appreciate the continuing and guiding love of Jesus as I work my way through my life and called ministries.

Back in the day, people of status would have a calling card that they would leave at a place they visited if the person they sought was unavailable or absent. The card would have their name and appropriate contact information on it so that the person would know who had visited and how to reach them. The closest thing we have in these modern times would be a business card. Hold this thought until the end of this post.

Why do prophecies exist? That's easy. They exist so that we can recognise when the Lord fulfills each of his promises. The Lord loves humanity and he desires to lead us to our full potential and salvation. This explains why he didn't nuke us from space (because that's the only way to be sure). Rather, after Adam and Eve fell from grace, he activated a plan that he had from before he even made the universe (Revelation 13:8).

The first Messianic reference is generally agreed to be Genesis 3:15 (almost a miracle itself ... do you how hard it is to get theologians to agree on anything?). A descendant of Eve (Jesus) will defeat the serpent (the Devil / Lucifer). The Lord has been firm on his plan and telling us how it was going to turn out for as long as we humans have been on this planet of ours. I'm not going to list them all here, but there are many prophecies of the Messiah and almost every aspect of his arrival, ministry and death. Actually, both of his arrivals and ministries. This makes it very important to recognise when a prophecy speaks of his first or his second arrival. Getting these mixed up can cause serious errors in your theology, but that's best left to discus another day.

There are many references to the Promised Land in the scriptures. The Promised Land was an area that the Lord promised to Abraham (Genesis 12:1,7) and all of his descendants. The land area included in the promise was larger than modern Israel. It was composed of both modern Israel and an amount of the surrounding land (Joshua 1:3-4).

The scriptures tell us much about the Promised Land and the story of the chosen people of God, the Hebrews (more commonly known now as the children of Israel or Israelites). Much of the Old Testament covers the accounts of the Hebrews being selected by God as his people, led to the Promised Land and their adventures taking it and keeping it from their hostile neighbors.

What there is not, is any direct explanation of why the Lord selected the area that he did for the Promised Land. After all, the Lord could have selected anywhere for the Hebrews to live. Why did he select semi-arid desert scrub-land when there was highly fertile land in either Egypt or the valley of Mesopotamia? The scriptures do give us the answer, but we have to dig a little.

I've had the opportunity to share this small vignette from my life a couple of times recently, so I'll also share it here in-case anyone else might find it amusing.

Before I was in the church, back when I lived in England, I was a bit of a metal-head. I listened to rock and heavy metal music and outside of work lived in jeans and black t-shirts. I had lots of black t-shirts, mostly band tour shirts. Henry Ford would have been proud of my t-shirt selection technique: any colour as long as it was black. How many black t-shirts did I own? Well, enough that they comprised a full load in the washing machine.

At some point, and I don't even remember the reason, I had purchased a bright red t-shirt and was worried about it bleeding all over my work shirts. This was back when as a programmer, I had to wear a suit and tie to the office. And then it dawned on me, just throw it in with my black t-shirt load. I will never know if that red t-shirt bled any colour in the wash, but I do know that all of my black t-shirts looked just fine afterwards.

A pastor is a saint before they are a pastor. I say this because there is tendency to regard pastors (all licensed ministers really) as above the regular folks in the church and I believe that this is unhealthy for church culture. Respecting your pastor and following their spiritual leadership is healthy, but considering them above you just because of their title is bad.

For the record, when I use the term saint, I'm using the biblical meaning of an individual saved believer within the church, not some alleged super Christian as taught by a certain large church organization who shall not be named here. Do a word search in your favorite bible study software or bible website and you’ll see what I mean.

Perhaps the root of the issue is that we have done a poor job separating people and roles (or offices if you prefer that term). This seems to be a general problem with humans as it happens even in the most secular of large corporations. For example, people get a job position with the word manager in the title and suddenly they are a MANAGER and don’t you forget that! The good ones rise above this, but many do not, providing backstory to the modern parable that "people don’t leave companies, they leave bad managers". The good managers are those who are still whatever they were before their promotion, only they now use their skills to help and provide for their team. My background before pastoring was IT and the good managers were still good programmers at heart. When I arrived at the role of Technical Lead, I had enough responsibilities on the project that my available programming time was limited, but I was still the one that my team came to when they got stuck because I was the best programmer. I considered that my role was to enable them to do their work, whatever that meant that I needed to do. I would run interference and keep them out of meetings whenever possible, I would help them when they got stuck, answer their questions or deal with organizational blockages.