What 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...
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You 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 permission to...
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 MOREHow 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 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 MOREEveryone is trying to find their way to joy, and if not joy, at least happiness. That’s a good desire, by the way: It fuels our search. It keeps us moving forward. Folks who give up even wanting to be happy are deep into what might be...
READ MOREWalk into any large mall, museum, amusement park, university, or hospital, and you will typically meet at once a very large map with the famous red star and the encouraging words "You are here". These maps are offered to visitors as ways to...
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.
As this year comes to a close, we want to lift up several powerful podcast...
READ MOREChesterton conducted something of a personal experiment to see what the overall impression would be if a person simply read the Gospels without any previous information regarding Jesus. What he found surprised him:
It is full of sudden...
READ MOREIf you wanted to learn how to heal the blind and you thought that following Christ around and watching how he did it would make things clear, you'd wind up pretty frustrated. He never does it the same way twice. He spits on one guy; for another,...
READ MOREThe Religious Spirit has turned discipleship into a soul-killing exercise of principles. Most folks don’t even know they can walk with God, hear his voice. He’s stigmatized counseling as a profession for sick patients, and so the wounds of our...
READ MORELet’s come back to Zacchaeus and the town harlot who crashed the party to weep at Jesus’ feet. They were, both of them, very keenly aware of their failures. They knew they had fallen way short of God’s goodness. And not only did they know it, but...
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