Our Perspective on What it Means to Follow Jesus Shapes How We Think and Act I’ve met people so fixated on heaven that they squander their time here on earth. Not only do they miss the opportunities before them, but they also offer a negative example to the world of what it means to be […]
How Much Time We Spend on Our Activities Reveals Our Priorities King David longs to build a temple for God, but God says this is not to be. Another, a descendant of David, will attend to its construction. Instead David must content himself with the temple’s planning and in accumulating its building materials. Then he […]
Jesus Provides a Simple Solution For Us to Follow When We Face Opposition Recently a friend asked for some assistance at a writers conference, for help in modeling a writer critique process. I and several others were happy to volunteer. We arrived at the session and disbursed ourselves throughout the room, each sitting at a […]
Jesus Condemns Those Who Supersede the Word of God With Their Religious Practices Jesus asks the people, “Why do you break the command of God for the sake of your traditions?” (Matthew 15:3). He goes on to give an example that is culturally relevant to his audience, but which doesn’t connect so much with us […]
God Doesn’t Want Part of Our Attention; He Deserves 100 Percent As the main speaker talked at a business conference, I looked around our table of eight. Seven people had their smartphones out, pushing buttons with intention and staring at those tiny screens as if they showed the most essential of images. Why were they […]
As Followers of Jesus We Can Point the Supernaturally Curious to God Premodern people saw everything as spiritual. Though modern thinking attempted to remove the spiritual from our everyday reality, the postmodern view is open to reunite them. For that I am glad. Yet not all that is spiritual is good. Consider all of the […]
Ministers Toil under a Load of Heavy Demands that Shouldn’t be There; We Must Change That I have read two stats about ministers that chafe at my soul. The first is that most pastors have no real friends. When you remove the relationships they have with their congregation and denomination, where they must always guard […]
Being Active at Church May Seem a Wise Use of Time, but It’s Often Misplaced Action One Sunday at church I passed our associate pastor as I scurried from one assignment to the next. “How are you?” he asked. Instead of lying with a socially acceptable response, I told him the truth. “Busy.” I sighed. […]
Nahum Offers Some Harsh Words to the City of Nineveh about Their Future The book of Nahum, a short three-chapter prophecy, centers on the city of Nineveh. If this city sounds familiar, if might be from the book of Jonah when God sends his prophet there to prophesy its destruction. After hearing Jonah’s blunt, half-hearted […]
The New Testament Centers on Jesus, but the Holy Spirit Emerges as Key in the Book of Acts We’ve talked about how the Bible Reveals God the Father to Us and how the Bible Points Us to Jesus. The Holy Spirit forms the third part of the Trinity, the supernatural mystery of three spiritual deities […]