Does your desire for correction outweigh your compassion? Does your passion for right belief overpower your ability to simply be present with someone who is in pain and just needs to be listened to? These are sobering questions. A couple of weeks ago, the weight of them really hit me as I listened to one …
In our world full of differences—race and ethnicity, political parties, various views on sexuality and identity, heated debates about climate change (pun intended), differing theology and denominationalism, pop culture, etc.—it can be so easy to bracket ourselves into pockets of people with whom we agree, and staunchly separate ourselves from those with whom we disagree. …
Be faithful with today. It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by our to-do lists: what to do now, what to do later, what to add, and what to remove. After years of existing in a state of always spiritually striving for what’s next, God, the kind and tender Father that He is, has brought me …
Sometimes we forget that the purpose of our preaching is simple: to proclaim “Christ and him crucified”—to make God known to people, and to point those people toward Him, not ourselves. We forget that the power of the Gospel rests not in our words but in the Word of God, His story, and in the movement of His Spirit.
Life is not about getting what we deserve. In Christ, it never has been and it never will be. Were it so, Jesus would not have died for our sins. He would not have hung on a cross in agony to pay the penalty of death due to us. He would not have freely and …
Christianity is not Republicanism. Republicanism is not Christianity. The two are not synonymous nor interchangeable: a person does not have to be one in order to be the other. Yet, that is largely the picture that is presented and believed both in and outside of the American Church today. This issue spans across the Catholic-Protestant …
Almost all of us, believer and non-believer alike, have encountered some presentation of God that we find difficult to swallow. Maybe it’s something about what we think God has done, what we assume He must be like based on X, or maybe it’s the age-old question of how to reconcile the problem of evil with …