Comfort in Discomfort Ever find yourself in a season of life when you’re hearing the same message repeated in several different sources? Maybe you read a Bible verse in your quiet time, then a day later you hear the same verse taught in a Bible study class, and...
Do We Spend More Time Praying to Bring People into Heaven or Keep Them Out? A friend raised this question in a conversation with me this week. Sounds like a silly thing to ask, right? As Christians, of course we pray for the salvation of unbelievers. We want...
The Power, Responsibility, and Blessing of Abiding What comes to mind when you hear the word vine? We might think of a vine as an ivy that clings to bricks or concrete. We may picture a twining vine, such as wisteria, that climbs by encircling a pole in a...
Is Salvation an Insurance Policy? Life can throw us curveballs. Unexpected events. Crises. Natural disasters. Broken pipes. Once-in-a-hundred-year storms. And we do our best to hedge our exposure. Which leads us to insurance policies. Home, renters’, flood, and...
What Habits Are You Locked Into? “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Jesus said this to His disciples when they failed to stay awake while He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane prior to His arrest. Fast forward two thousand years. All too often my...
An Impossible Standard? Has God set us up for failure? It might feel that way when we read some of the commands in the Bible. Some standards seem impossible to attain. Love your enemies. Do good to those who persecute you. Take up your cross. Don’t be anxious for...
Are You “Wildflower Dating” or “Snowmanning” God? As I talk to singles today, I often wish for a slang dictionary to keep up with their descriptions of our contemporary dating culture. Regardless of age, terms such as pocketing, cookie-jarring, ghosting,...
Blessings in Disguise Ever hear about a guy named Jabez? He was all the rage 25 years ago, or at least his prayer was all the rage. I’ve been praying a tweaked version of that prayer for years. And it centers around redefined blessings. Jabez and his now-famous...
Funeral of My Independence So many funerals in the past several months. Funerals commemorating the end of physical lives. The end of hopes and dreams. And the end of relationships that leave a hole in our hearts. Funerals acknowledge that physical death is a painful...
Pause, Pray, Ponder, Proceed We’ve all experienced times when life throws us a curveball. Have you ever adopted the four P’s—pause, pray, ponder, proceed—in those situations? A friend shared this practice as a biblically wise method of approaching bumps in the...
Comfort in Discomfort Ever find yourself in a season of life when you’re hearing the same message repeated in...
Do We Spend More Time Praying to Bring People into Heaven or Keep Them Out? A friend raised this question in a...
The Power, Responsibility, and Blessing of Abiding What comes to mind when you hear the word vine? We might...