John Mark Hicks

Delivered at the Restoration Collective in Dallas, TX, on April 21, 2026. “But a devotional and sanctifying reading of that sacred Book, is essentially different from the readings of the theologian, the moralist, the sectary, and the virtuoso of every caste and school. The man of God reads the Book of God to commune with […]

PDF Version available here. I graduated from Freed-Hardeman University in 1977, and I remember well the discussions of “Crossroads” and the beginnings of a discipling ministry that grew into the Boston Movement and then the International Churches of Christ. I began full time teaching in higher education among Churches of Christ in 1982 and am […]

How should we walk? And how can we walk? (Ephesians 4:17-24) Disciples of Jesus, those who learned about the Messiah, are to walk worthy of their calling (Ephesians 4:1). These first generation Gentile believers are called to no longer walk as they used to walk as people alienated from God, but to walk in the […]

Texts: Acts 6:7; 4:23-31; 12:24; Revelation 5:9-13 Days 65-67 in Around the Bible in Eighty Days. When God created the cosmos, God invested in humanity a particular vocation:  fill the earth, subdue the chaos, and shepherd (rule) the creation (Genesis 1:28). As participants in the new creation, the people of God extend this human vocation […]

This sermon, which begins at the 30 minute mark, provides an exposition of John 13:31-35 in the context of Jesus’s “table talk” (farewell discourse) with his disciples.

Imperial residents, submit to the empire. Slaves, submit to your masters. This submission, Peter tells us, is grounded in our vocation or calling. We are called into a life of submission because Jesus is our model (pattern, example). Our vocational mission as the people of God is grounded in the life of Jesus as the […]

Leaving the upper room of the Last Supper, Jesus leads his disciples across the Kidron Valley onto the Mount of Olives to a place called Gethsemane. Here Jesus will pray and then suffer betrayal and arrest. That is an answer to prayer none would relish. Several trajectories are at play in this narrative that take […]

My longtime good friend, John King, is engaged in training people around the world in Discovery Bible Studies as part of the CityTeam Ministries’ Disciple Making Movement or the Church Planting Movement (specifically the work of David Watson). I love what he is doing with the support of his wife Debra. John recommended that I read Miraculous Movements: How […]

With Tennessee now a Confederate state and at war with the Union, Fanning published an article entitled “Taking up the Cross,” in the August issue of the Gospel Advocate 7.8 (1861), 244-245. What did it mean to “take up the cross” in August 1861 for Tennesseans, Confederates or Unionists? On the one hand, it meant abandoning […]

Mark’s travelogue describes the journey of Jesus from Galilee (9:33) to Perea (10:1) to Jericho (10:46) to Bethany (11:1) and finally to Jerusalem (11:11). But this movement is more than geographical. The theme that runs through this journey to death is servanthood (9:35; 10:44-45) and the call to assume the role of the “last” rather than […]