This is an excerpt from the first chapter of Being Family by Scott Keith (1517 Publishing, 2026), pgs 1-6.
God has told us everything necessary for faith. However he has not told us everything there is to know.
Jesus didn’t enter the water because he was sinful; he entered the water because John was sinful, as are we all.

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Sin, death, and Satan may have had more than a puncher's chance to beat us, but when God stepped into the ring, they should have admitted defeat and thrown in the towel.
By his initiative alone, he remakes our hearts to love him and others unselfishly.
People are searching for connection, direction, and hope in a troubled world, and we can use their star-shaped questions to point them to the shape of the cross.
How can we best talk about the Gospel with an Old Testament accent? Chad Bird provides us with a helpful "map" that highlights Egypt, the Red Sea, and Jerusalem. These three places represent the ways in which God graciously redeems, delivers, and sanctifies us. This brief essay was delivered at the 1517 Regional Conference in Bentonville, Arkansas, on April 17, 2021.
The biblical shepherd leads his sheep. He provides for their needs. He protects them from enemies, and he does not leave his sheep unattended.
We will always need comfort until the reign of God, his kingdom, comes in full with Christ’s return, and our suffering and the sin that causes it is no more.
Tomorrow Jesus will laugh his way out of the tomb, spit in the face of death, and kick the devil in the throat as he dances to the clapping glee of angelic masses. But today he just rests.
Each day gives us occasion to die to our sinful identities of all kinds and to live out a life in Christ’s footsteps as children of God.
Golgotha is the point where not only Mary and John’s family life assumed a new character, but it is the point of orientation for all human community that uses the cross to straighten out the lives of individuals turned in upon themselves.
The cross does not remain on a hill far away. It pursues us into the valleys, the ravines, the crevices in which we get trapped as we wander in search of a fixed point for our lives.
Jesus is not just another king in the line of David—this is the new King David! Hosanna in the highest!
Jesus takes the sins of man upon Himself and carries them to the cross to make our hearts holy and acceptable in the eyes of God.