Can you imagine if on your honeymoon one of you sneaked off for a rendezvous with a perfect stranger? Adam and Eve kicked off the honeymoon by sleeping with the Enemy. Then comes one of the most poignant verses in all Scripture: "What is this you...
READ MOREThe book “Killing Lions” is a conversation between John and Sam Eldredge about the trials young men face.
[John] You simply cannot neglect the heart and get away with it. The mind is a beautiful...
READ MOREThe Religious Man or Woman is a popular story option in which we try to reduce the wildness of life by constructing a system of promises and rewards, a contract that will obligate God to grant us exemption from the Arrows. It really doesn't...
READ MOREWe now are going to war. This is the beginning of the end.
The hour is late, and you are needed. We need your heart.
If there were something more I could do to help you see, I wish to God I could have done it. Tears fill...
Imagine, friends, a world without evil. Every demon has been swept away. Simply imagine a world without evil people, where everyone loves God and overflows with his holy love. You look to your right and left, and you only see people you can trust...
READ MOREHearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all...
READ MOREThe way to begin to get free of this debris, to remove these limits you’ve unknowingly placed on Jesus, is first to name what the problem is. Where are you having a hard time with Jesus? Where is your struggle with him?
Do you...
READ MOREThis is what Jesus nearly always does when he comes to mend those rifts in our hearts. He brings his comfort and mercy to those times and places where we suffered the shattering blow, and the heart in that place often feels the same age as it was...
READ MOREOnce we begin thinking of all the deceptions the Enemy is about with regard to our lives, we have a tendency to become obsessed with him, fearful of what he is going to do next. Once we take him seriously, he switches from his tactic of “I’m not...
READ MOREWe all have a way that we do life. We might call it our personality, or our natural bent — the way we handle pressure, the way we listen, the way we look for happiness, the way we control our world. We didn’t sit down one day and willfully choose...
READ MOREMaybe the most devastating limit is simply the idea that “Jesus doesn’t act like that anymore.” (Or, “Jesus doesn’t act like that with me.”) Sure —he was amazing in the Gospels. But that was then and this is now and things have changed. Or so the...
READ MORELet me say this again: the story of your life is the story of the long and brutal assault on your heart by the one who knows what you could be and fears it. I hope you are beginning to see that more clearly now. Otherwise, much of the Bible will...
READ MOREYou are not your sin; sin is no longer the truest thing about the man who has come into union with Jesus. Your heart is good. "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you" (Ezek. 36:26). The Big Lie in the church today is that you are...
READ MOREPrayer sets up a terrible dilemma for us. We want to pray; it’s in our nature. We desperately want to believe that God will come through for us. But then ... he doesn’t seem to, and where does that leave us?
I believe God is in...
READ MORETwice, in the famous chapter of Romans 7, where Paul presents a first-person angst about our battle against sin, he says, "But this is not my true nature. This is not my heart."
As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it,...
Jesus is a fierce, intentional man to be sure. But his passions are neither reckless nor momentary.
Could a small, unintimidating figure accomplish such a sustained riot? To pull off driving “all of them out of the temple” would...
When Neo is set free from the Matrix, he joins the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar — the little hovercraft that is the headquarters and ship of the small fellowship called to set the captives free. There are nine of them in all, each a...
READ MORE“Love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus taught (Mark 12:31), implying a direct link between one and the other. Loving our neighbor is clearly an essential to Christian faith; I think we all get that one. But the qualifier “as yourself” is lost...
READ MOREEvery woman is in some way searching for or running from her beauty and every man is looking for or avoiding his strength. Why? In some deep place within, we remember what we were made to be, we carry with us the memory of gods, image-bearers...
READ MOREThe longing for things to be good again is one of the deepest yearnings of the human heart. It has slumbered in the depths of our souls ever since we lost our true home. For our hearts remember Eden.
Most of the time this beautiful,...