"Watch your life and doctrine closely"
I had recently become a pastor in a new town and wanted to meet some church members living in the local nursing home. I walked through the doors and immediately heard the TV in the lobby blaring loudly. Some residents slept on the couch while others rested comfortably in their wheelchairs watching “Wheel of Fortune.”…
Human beings are people of extremes. The pages of history give testimony to our ability to diagnose a problem and then overcorrect to an opposite error. Children raised under the pressures of legalism often gravitate toward licentiousness. Reacting against an overemphasis in logic, some have gone to the opposite error of relative truth. The church…
Everyone seems so busy in our fast-paced society. There’s always more work to do or places to go. We fill our calendars with appointments and tasks while marveling at our administration skills. We complain about our lack of rest but we seem more afraid of down time, and the threat of burn-out always looms. God…
Sometimes a specific moment hits you hard. Maybe while playing with your kids and hearing them giggle and squeal with laughter you are immediately struck with a deep gratitude. Your whole life seems to flash before your eyes in an instant and you can’t imagine ending up in a better situation than here in this…
The hardest part of preaching is living. I can’t stand before God’s people and proclaim God’s Word without being painfully aware that I’m a wretched sinner. How can I teach others when I don’t have it figured out myself? Why should someone listen to my exhortation to Christlikeness when I fall so far from it?…
If God were not sovereign, it’d still be dark and void, He spoke the light into existence, Throughout the earth all life deployed, From nothing came solar systems, His voice commanded conformity, His power had the authority, All came to be with no resistance. If God were not sovereign, what would Israel do? Trapped on…
A collection of links to encourage your growth in grace: Fathers, Do You Provoke Your Children? “How can we walk by the Spirit and bear spiritual fruit unless we are spending time in daily communion? Fathers, the grace of God is flowing like a cool, crisp spring stream, and we need to continually wade in…
It was the strangest of times, it was the most frustrating of times. How else could one revise Dickens’ famous opening line to describe our current cultural era? Foundational ideas and understandings are changing at lightening pace. The majority opinion from twenty years ago regarding marriage is now viewed as oppressive and unwelcome in public…
A collection of links to encourage your growth in grace: Last School Drop Off, Last Drive-to-School Prayer “I prayed my usual drive-to-school prayer for her. It’s a prayer my girls have heard each time I’ve had the privilege of dropping them off in the morning—the car growing increasingly quiet with each passing year. I’ve been…
I wipe the sweat from my forehead with my dirty hands as I look with a feeling of accomplishment. In the ground before me is a small square of tilled up dirt that, Lord willing, will soon flourish with green plants bearing delicious tomatoes, watermelon, cucumbers, green beans, and many other healthy vegetables for my…