Life is a journey of the heart that requires the mind—not the other way around. The church sometimes gets this backward and makes knowing the right things the center of life. It’s not; the heart is the center of life. Desire is always where the...
READ MORELove your neighbor, Jesus urged, as you love yourself. (Which, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, is a pretty sick command if we are to hate ourselves.) How you handle people is the second great test of your character.
Again, Jesus is...
READ MOREThe book “Killing Lions” is a conversation between John and Sam Eldredge about the trials young men face.
[Sam] I know so many of us long for words of validation, but few ever hear them. An acquaintance...
READ MOREWhat do I pray, Lord? What is this about?
Pause. This is a really, really helpful place to begin — to ask God what to pray. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m looking at the equivalent of a two-headed rooster on my...
READ MOREI thought of Jesus’ warning about the end of the age, how as times grow dark and people feel more keenly pressed, love will grow rare. “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom … Because of the increase of wickedness, the love...
READ MOREBut you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come...
READ MOREI 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...
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