You 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,...
The constant push in Western Christianity to “make it practical” betrays our favorite apostasy—it exposes how utterly fixated on the present moment we really are.
Yes, we need to embody God’s love in the world today. The human...
READ MOREHuman beings need oxygen in order to live. Lots of it. So our loving God provided us a world completely engulfed in oxygen; we swim in life-giving air like fish swim in water. Put your arm out — it’s surrounded with oxygen. Look down at your feet...
READ MOREIn this world where we find ourselves living, having joy often feels both crazy and out of reach.
To have joy in the midst of sorrow — or the current news feed — can seem impossible. And all on our own, it is impossible. But just as...
On the day Adam and Eve fell from grace, they ran off and hid in the bushes. And God came looking for them. He called to Adam, "Where are you?" (Gen. 3:9). Thus began the long and painful story of God's pursuit of mankind. Though we betrayed him...
READ MOREYes, dear friends, we are already God's children, and we can't even imagine what we will be like when Christ returns. But we do know that when he comes we will be like him, for we will see him as he really is. (1 John 3:2 NLT)
...
READ MOREBut there’s something deeper that calls to me, something richer I have tasted which compels me to let go of the life I keep rebuilding in order to learn how to love.
I want God.
Can you name a better reason? There...
READ MOREOne of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, she brought an...
READ MOREWhat do all the great stories and myths tell us? What do they have in common? What are they trying to get across? Wherever they may come from, whatever their shape might be, they nearly always speak to us Three Eternal Truths. First, these...
READ MOREThe book “Killing Lions” is a conversation between John and Sam Eldredge about the trials young men face.
[John] You have entered the Warrior Stage of a young man’s life. Young men have been at the...
READ MOREThe loss of personality confounds our imitation of Christ. What happens is, our particular brand of church seizes upon one or two of his virtues as the essence of Christ for us to follow. Justice. Mercy. Righteousness. Whatever. You cannot live a...
READ MOREThere is an overlooked passage late in the New Testament that is going to begin to connect some dots for us in a wild way. It comes from the book of James, and he brings us back around to the old man, Elijah, praying on the mountain: “The prayer...
READ MOREHow quickly do betrayal and slavery fall upon Joseph after his father gives him the coat of many colors, the symbol of his delight. We don’t know exactly how much time has passed, but those events are told in the same chapter in Genesis, barely...
READ MORE