It was the day after Christmas, 1862, in the town square of Mankato, Minnesota, that 38 Dakota warriors were hanged at the order of president Abraham Lincoln. After 150 years, it is still the largest mass execution in American history.

Mankato is about 80 miles southwest of the Twin Cities. In 1862, it was a frontier town in the thick of growing tensions between the quickly multiplying white settlers and the increasingly marginalized Dakota natives. The mass execution was essentially the memorable conclusion to what is now known as the U.S.-Dakota War (also known as the Sioux Uprising of 1862, as the settlers called the natives Sioux Indians).

How War Erupted

In the summer of 1862, the…

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Christmas is the day heaven kissed earth.

The Eternal Word, the golden son of heaven, humbly and willingly took up our comparatively lowly humanity, without ceasing to be God, and entered into the created realm, coming to earth as one of us.

And it wasn’t some kind of circus stunt, for mere show, but for our sake. The Great Move was all of grace and for our rescue. It is history’s climactic expression of love and favor.

Heaven kissed earth.

This way of talking about the incarnation comes from Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680), Puritan preacher, theologian, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, and member of the Westminster Assembly. Goodwin described the wonder of what happened at that first Christ…

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Jesus was born of a virgin. This is a glory unique to the one God-man.

Of the billions of humans who have lived throughout history, only one person entered the world in this way. There is only one mediator between God and man (1 Timothy 2:5), and there is only one human who was virgin born.

Jesus’s distinctive birth is no myth or mere random fact from the Gospels. It is a special honor conferred only on the Son of God incarnate. And it is full of significance for knowing the person of Jesus and the God who has revealed himself in him.

Supernatural, Not Mythical

Matthew and Luke wrote the authoritative accounts. We have no good reason to think either was gullible in the least. Matthe…

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By now, most of us in the West are up to our necks in holiday commercialization. Far too many of us feel like we’re once again stumbling toward Christmas, exhausted and depleted by the most consumeristic season in history’s most consumeristic civilization.

When inundated with the pressures and relentless commercializing of the Christmas season, one memorable personality on the sitcom Seinfeld abandoned Christmas altogether and up and created his own holiday, or anti-holiday. As some of us will recall, it was the father of Jerry Seinfeld’s good friend George — his name, Frank Costanza — who created the December 23 observance called “Festivus” in the 1997 episode called “The Strike.”

Toda…

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We dare you to find a better, and shorter, summary for the doctrine of the incarnation than John 1:14: “The Word became flesh.”

We grabbed Don Carson while he was in the Twin Cities earlier this month and asked him about this important doctrine at the very heart of Christmas. At the first Advent, the eternal Son of God took to himself full humanity. Without ceasing to be God, he became man. He is one uniquely spectacular person with two full and complete natures, perfectly and personally calibrated for us and for our salvation.

As always, Theology Refresh aims to sharpen pastors and other Christian leaders on important doctrines in hopes of making our theology be what must to be healthy …

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Most of us would have been scared away from the Middle East by the events of September 11, 2001. But not Mack Stiles.

Not that he didn’t waver just a bit. Here’s the story.

Loosening the Roots

For years Mack had labored stateside with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in an administrative job that, you might say, didn’t fit him like a glove. If you’ve met Mack, you likely noticed right from the start how outgoing and people-oriented and relationally energetic he is. Not that administrators can’t be people-people. It’s just this particular slot wasn’t optimal for this particular Mack.

After much wrestling, Mack sensed that God was loosening his American roots and preparing him and his…

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At long last, Bilbo Baggins is back. Whether you’re fanatic enough to dress up for the midnight showing, or patiently awaiting a weekend outing, or even content to meander into a theater after the crowds die down, here’s some advice for how to make the most of your experience of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

Don’t worry, there’s no spoiler below. My hope in seeing an early screening of the film is to be at your service in preparing you for the viewing, not by letting any cat out of the bag — although if you’ve read the book, you know where this film is going.

It is fitting to mentally and emotionally prepare yourself for an experience like this. That’s precisely what the story’s cre…

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Playfulness is vital to healthy Christianity, says pastor and professor Erik Thoennes. “To be a Christian means to take God very seriously, but not ourselves.”

The great source of Christian playfulness is God himself, and the lavishness of his creation kindness and redeeming grace. Toss in some good healthy competition — and yes, competition can be good and healthy — and you have a recipe for sport and athletics.

For the Christian, there’s no such thing as “just a game,” says Thoennes, who is a professor at Biola, a pastor in La Mirada, California, and the author of “Created to Play: Thoughts on Play, Sport, and the Christian Life.”

Not just sports, but everything we do is glory-…

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Advent is for adoring Jesus.

It’s an annual season of patient waiting, hopeful expectation, soul-searching, and calendar-watching marked by many churches, Christian families, and individual followers of Jesus. There’s no biblical mandate to observe Advent. It’s an optional thing — a tradition that developed over the course of the church’s history as a time of preparation for Christmas Day. Many of us find observing Advent to be personally enjoyable and spiritually profitable.

Why Advent

The English word “Advent” is from the Latin adventus, which means “coming.” The advent primarily in view each December is the first coming of Jesus two millennia ago. But Jesus’s second coming gets draw…

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Here on the last day of November — endearingly known as Movember by many working a fresh mustache for men’s health awareness — we went behind the blog for some backstories on the full face of content we grew in the last month.

Some posts are pretty straightforward in their conception, production, and presentation. But others have more disputed histories, with uncertainties about their precise genesis or even a touch of conspiracy theory. Like our new Advent ebook.

In this episode, we talk about the new collection of December devotional readings from John Piper, as well as several fresh resources from the past month. Topics range from Spurgeon’s rocker to improving your baptism to wha…

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