By God’s grace, we have seen one of our daughters come to faith in Jesus and will be baptizing her in a few weeks. For the first nine years of her life, the major question in how we raised her has been how we can help her see her need for Jesus. Now, the question is changing into how we can help her grow in her walk with Christ. While she is in a church full of people who love... Read more
For those who labor in service of the church, the ministry can become all-consuming. You never feel as if the job has been completed, because it never is. Every time you close out the day and lay your head on the pillow, you do so with the knowledge that there are more people to share the Gospel with, more believers to be discipled, more biblical passages to study, more books to read, more prayers to pray, and more leaders to... Read more
When difficult times come along, is your first instinct to remember the goodness of God and rest in him, or to allow panic mode to set in? If we’re all honest, our first instinct is not to stop, think, and reflect on great and glorious truths when times are hard. All too often, it takes time before we turn to the wonderful truths that sustain our souls when we walk through trials. The last month has thrown several difficult trials... Read more
The other day I was on a drive through a part of my city that I have not been to in a while and saw a billboard for a church. In bright letters, their sign said something like “Where you are always loved and never judged.” This sounds good to us initially because we have been trained to think that being judged by another person is the worst thing that can happen to us. I remember in 1997 hearing a... Read more
The discipline of memorizing Bible verses pays great dividends in the life of a Christian. Having Scripture stored up in our hearts helps us to remember God’s promises in tough times, flee from sin in moments of temptation, possess greater confidence in sharing the Gospel, and give fresh words of encouragement to struggling Christians. The problem for us is that while memorizing a verse presents a challenge, remembering it in three months is a great difficulty. We often find ourselves... Read more
Some books land in your hands at just the right time. This was definitely true for me with David Murray’s new book Reset: Living a Grace-Paced Life in a Burnout Culture. Dr. Murray tells the story of his own struggle with overwork and burnout then helps men understand how they can refresh and recover when they are worn out. (Refresh, which he coauthors with his wife Shona, will be out this fall.) His advice is rooted in the truths of the Gospel and work out practically in... Read more
When I was younger, if you wanted to know what the latest news was, you read the newspaper in the morning or watched the national news at 5:30 and the local news at 6:00 and 10:00. Then CNN and Headline News showed up and you could get a feel for what was going on every 30 minutes. Even then though, you had to seek the news. You opened the paper or turned the channel to the news. We live in... Read more
Parenting certainly has been different than I imagined it would be as we prepared to welcome our first daughter into the world a dozen years ago. For one thing, I grew up with nothing but brothers, so I never imagined having three daughters and one son. I also figured that by the time I was an almost forty-year-old man I would know exactly how to parent my children because I already had so many great parenting theories as a twenty-seven-year-old... Read more
At our church right now, we are working through the Gospel of Matthew. I’ve enjoyed preaching through this moving narrative of the life of Jesus the last six months. A few months ago we came to the Beatitudes, which I was glad to do because there is so much good literature out there to survey. While I was looking forward to pulling out some classics like Thomas Watson and Martyn Lloyd-Jones, I gained a lot of help, encouragement, and perspective... Read more
One of the ironies of our present moment is that our lives are filled with time-saving devices, yet we find ourselves with less and less time and energy. The noise starts the second we wake up. Many of us check our phones before we do anything else. Our phones allow work to follow us home and one “quick” check of your email can ruin a whole night. We have more demands on our time, people expect us to respond to... Read more
One Degree to Another
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