This is a love story, dear friends. God is love, the apostle John tells us, and then he says it again so that we don’t forget, “God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God” (1 John 4:16). Love is the single most defining quality of...
READ MOREFor above all else, the Christian life is a love affair of the heart. It cannot be lived primarily as a set of principles or ethics. It cannot be managed with steps and programs. It cannot be lived exclusively as a moral code leading to...
READ MOREStasi Eldredge's book "Free to Be Me" helps teen girls become the young women God created them to be.
It can be hard to be happy with how God made you at any particular time but especially in the teen years. We...
READ MOREEvery courtship, at least every healthy one, is moving toward a deeper heart intimacy that is the ground for the consummation of the relationship spiritually, emotionally, and physically. The first question in the orthodox confessions of faith...
READ MOREWe are more keenly aware of our own shortcomings than anyone else. Remembering the glory that was once ours awakens my heart to an ache that has long gone unfulfilled. It’s almost too much to hope for, too much to have lost.
You...
READ MORETrue transformation cannot be forced from the outside. It’s an inside-out process. Who of us has not received or created a list of ways to live, eat, exercise, respond, seek God, grow, and change—and how long did it last, if it worked at all?...
READ MOREWhat is it that God wants from you?
He wants the same thing that you want. He wants to be loved. He wants to be known as only lovers can know each other. He wants intimacy with you. Yes, yes, he wants your obedience, but only when...
READ MOREYou must understand an important distinction — there is Christianity, and then there is church culture. They are not the same. Often they are far from the same. The personality conveyed through much of Christian culture is not the personality of...
READ MOREWe feel that God is not only unconcerned with our plight, but that he is actually working against us. And sometimes, we are right… Indeed, in the seventeenth chapter of Acts, Paul gives the Athenians the stunning news that every single thing in...
READ MOREWisdom is crucial. But wisdom is not enough. Wisdom is essential...and insufficient.
Saul of Tarsus was headed to Damascus, "breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples," with official documents granting him...
How God loves his people to ask him in faith—pressing in, continuing to ask no matter how long it takes, believing that he will come through for us. I just got off the phone with a friend who has been praying for her children to come to know...
READ MOREScripture names hope as one of the Three Great Forces of human existence:
Three things will last forever — faith, hope, and love. (1 Corinthians 13:13 NLT)
By saying they last forever, God names these...
READ MOREThrough his cross he paid for our sin, cleansed us, bought us out of the dungeons of the evil one and brought us back to his Abba. Jesus established a whole new way of relating to God. He often reclined at meals with people; he stopped along the...
READ MOREWe grow during meaningful conversations with kindred spirits. But that's often hard to find in the midst of our non-stop days filled with never-ending to-do lists. Today, we want to lift up several powerful podcast conversations as a way to...
READ MOREStasi Eldredge's book "Free to Be Me" helps teen girls become the young women God created them to be.
Like you, I have areas in my life that I want and need to change. But I’ve learned the freeing truth that God...
READ MOREEvery woman knows now that she is not what she was meant to be. And she fears that soon it will be known—if it hasn't already been discovered—and that she will be abandoned. Left alone to die a death of the heart. That is a woman's worst fear—...
READ MOREI don't fully understand the modern church's amnesia-plus-aversion regarding one of the most central qualities of God understood for centuries before us:
The LORD is a warrior; the LORD is his name. (Ex. 15:3 NIV)
...
READ MOREImagine the stories that we'll hear. And all the questions that shall finally have answers. "What were you thinking when you drove the old Ford out on the ice?" "Did you hear that Betty and Dan got back together? But of course you did — you were...
READ MORELife on the road takes us into our heart, for only when we are present in the deep sentences can God speak to them. That's why the Story is a journey; it has to be lived, it cannot simply be talked about. When we face trials, our most...
READ MOREJesus is inviting us to relax into the beauty he has bestowed upon us and cease striving to attain a level of smooth perfection that looks wonderful on a doll or on a magazine cover but is not attainable in the living, breathing realm of humanity...
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