I cannot say this more emphatically—life affected Jesus. “We have spread so many ashes over the historical Jesus that we scarcely feel the glow of His presence anymore,” lamented Brennan Manning. “He is a man in a way that we have forgotten men...
READ MOREWe value independence. Mobility. Self-sufficiency. Yay. But we are a dependent people. Dependent on air, food, water. Needful of others. Needful of God. He is our divine helper, our ezer, without whom we will not be able to live a life...
READ MOREOne of the saddest of all the sad stories in the history of the people of God comes shortly after the dramatic exodus from Egypt, as they stand on the brink of a whole new life in the land God had promised:
But you were unwilling...
READ MORESometimes we feel hopeless to ever change simply because our personal history is filled with our failed attempts to change. Where was that angel who was supposed to be guarding our tongue and preventing those harsh words from lashing out at our...
READ MOREWhere do we go from here? "This life," wrote Jonathan Edwards, "ought to be spent by us only as a journey towards heaven." That's the only story worth living in now. The road goes out before us and our destination awaits. In the imagery of...
READ MOREThe deeper reason we fear our own glory is that once we let others see it, they will have seen the truest us, and that is nakedness indeed. We can repent of our sin. We can work on our "issues." But there is nothing to be "done" about our glory....
READ MOREBelieving in God is not the same thing as union with God. Doing various God — activities is not the same as union with God. Obeying God isn’t necessarily union with God.
These things can all be done while there is a kind of distance...
Do not give way to fear. (1 Peter 3:6)
The reason we fear to step out is because we know that it might not go well (is that an understatement?). We have a history of wounds screaming at us to play it safe. We feel so...
READ MOREChristianity is often presented as essentially the transfer of a body of knowledge. We learn about where the Philistines were from, and how much a drachma would be worth today, and all sorts of things about the original Greek. The information...
READ MOREWe long for beauty, and when the biblical writers speak of heaven, they use the most beautiful imagery they can. You can almost hear the agony of the writer trying to get it right while knowing he falls far short of what he sees. In the book of...
READ MOREAdventure, with all its requisite danger and wildness, is a deeply spiritual longing written into the soul of man. The masculine heart needs a place where nothing is prefabricated, modular, nonfat, ziplock, franchised, on-line, microwavable....
READ MORELet me tell you, few things can mess you up as badly as trying to do your best. For the tender heart, the earnest heart, it is so discouraging to give all you have trying to do what you think Jesus would have you do, and find yourself falling...
READ MOREIf you'll recall, Moses put a veil over his face, first to hide his glory, then to hide the fact that it was fading away. That, too, was a picture of a deeper reality. We all do that. We all have veiled our glory, or someone has veiled it for us...
READ MOREThe Israelites had to fight to get to the promised land, and they had to fight to get in. Once there, they had to fight to clear it of enemies, and then fight to keep it so. David had to fight to secure his throne, and he too had to fight to keep...
READ MOREAll good things come to an end. I hate that phrase. It's a lie. Even our troubles and our heartbreaks tell us something about our true destiny. The tragedies that strike us to the core and elicit the cry "this isn't the way it was supposed to be...
READ MOREToday’s Daily Reading is an excerpt from Morgan Snyder's book Becoming a King.
Let’s face it, there’s nothing like marriage to allure us and at the same time make us spontaneously combust with fear or anger at a moment’s...
We are invited to become followers of Jesus.
Not just believers. Followers. There is a difference.
Follower assumes that someone else is doing the leading. As in “He calls his own sheep by name...
READ MORE“What people think of me” is a very powerful motivator. It is still shaping us more than we’d like to admit. It shapes our theology, our politics, our values.
Do any of us go through one entire day being utterly true no matter how...
There is nothing so inspiring to a man as a beautiful woman. She’ll make you want to charge the castle, slay the giant, leap across the parapets. Or maybe, hit a home run.
A man wants to be the hero to the beauty. Young men going off...
God sets his own image on the earth. He creates a being like himself. He creates a son. The LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. (...
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