As part of God’s sanctifying providence Christians must endure difficult seasons of frustration. Some will be brief and others lengthy, but they will all test our affections and whittle away our worldliness. Our questions will not always be about God’s power or authority but about his care. Will he indeed mend the wounds he is right to cause? Answers will be few for most of them or at least selfishly […]
Football is king in Texas. Our pastoral stint in the Lone Star state awakened me to the hysteria that is 6A high school football. With its own Jumbotron and state-of-the-art turf field, the local high school had facilities fit for most small college programs. I watched a future Heisman trophy winner triple-option his way to championships, and former NFL players coach on the sidelines. The school also introduced each new season […]
The sun rose beautifully on Memphis today. And when the sun rose the gospel rose with it. I wonder if we might overplay our hand when we make the creation accounts in Gen 1-2 merely about, well, creation. Is God merely trying to explain how things came to be, the science of origins? Or is God weaving in the created order the very fabric of the gospel he will work […]
You parents know what it’s like to traipse through Sea World thinking, “So this is what my parents went through!” As a kid, I strolled through Sea World without a care in the world as if the whole park were mine to explore. All the while my parents counted pennies, peeled eyes, shared drinks and hauled souvenirs. Now I was the one doing it for our children. “Stay with us!” “Don’t […]
“When [God] causes the gospel to be preached, it is certainly the case that he is not saying, ‘I have come to save Simon Peter or Cornelius the centurion or Mary Magdalene.’ He calls no one by the name given them by men at the time of their circumcision or baptism. Were that the case, we could certainly doubt our salvation, for then the thought would legitimately arise that not we but […]
The church of Jesus Christ is the alternative kingdom to the kingdom of this age. She is the evidence that Jesus has begun reclaiming, restoring and resurrecting what is rightfully his: a people devoted to and pleased by God’s glory (Eph 5.26-27, 32). God shows us through the church he is repairing what has gone wrong with our world through, in and for Christ (Eph 3.8-11). And since we are what’s wrong […]
“Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear” (Eph 4.29). I don’t know about your home but our three kids fight. A lot. One minute they are laughing and playing. The next minute they are fighting, snatching and calling one another names. Like […]
Endurance in an important word in the Christian faith. We might well consider it the defining mark of the Christian. Jesus himself said, “. . . it is the one who has endured to the end who will be saved” (Mt 10.22; 24.13; cf. Mk 13.13). Many will appear to start in the Christian faith but who do not endure in that faith (Mt 7.13-27; Lk 8.4-15). And those who […]
And Jesus said to them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12.17). Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1862 about the Union and Confederacy’s conflict over slavery, “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the […]
“Is it true that what we will be doing for eternity is worshiping God?” he asked. “Well,” I said, “that seems to be what the Bible teaches,” briefly referring to Revelation 4-5. “Hmm,” he said, “that sounds boring to me.” That conversation happened 11-plus years ago and still echoes loudly in my soul. I was thrilled he was thinking about heaven. But he revealed more than personal contemplations about the […]