Throughout the fifty years of Edith Cavell’s life, she was content to work hard and live humbly. She was a godly woman and, therefore, a godly historical example. The Bible instructs us to teach our children about such historical examples. Psalm 78:4 reads: “We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming... Continue Reading

Where to begin? Begin with a book that looks interesting, not necessarily with one that looks like it will change your life. Find one that looks intriguing and let yourself get swept into it. There will be time to read the life-changers later on. The most important thing for today is to just build the... Continue Reading

If Jesus wasn’t truly forsaken—if he didn’t really endure the equivalent of eternal punishment on the cross—then substitutionary atonement is a legal fiction. If Jesus didn’t really suffer the pains of hell on the cross, then the infinite and eternal wrath of God is not truly propitiated. If Jesus didn’t become the object of the... Continue Reading

Matthew’s genealogy has a past, a present, and future. In Jesus Christ we’re now brought into this family; Abraham and David become our fathers. It becomes our genealogy, our family tree. Though this world seeks historical rooting and future life in various ways, only one child establishes the new creation.   The Bible contains 66... Continue Reading

Laughing at the Days to Come is a book about embracing and enduring life’s trials with divine joy. It is about gaining the kind of vision of that Proverbs 31 woman who can look into an unknown future and a long path of suffering and still rejoice. I think it’s fair to say that it’s... Continue Reading

When we realize that human marriage—at its most faithful, loving, and intense—is designed to point us to Christ’s love for us, our paradigms shift. The different callings of husbands and wives are not grounded in gendered psychology but in Christ-centered theology. The requirement that marriage be male-female is not a random prescription from a bygone... Continue Reading

Despite being Christians, some see themselves as poor Humpty, laying on the ground with the king’s horses and the king’s men passing by, unable to put Humpty back together. For some, these fractured pieces might be their past—ways in which they sinned or were sinned against. They think that those pieces remain forever broken at... Continue Reading

God has not placed a special physical birthmark on the elect. The elect do not have the word elect divinely tattooed behind their right ears or anywhere else. The elect are not members of a particular identifiable race or ethnic group. The elect are from every tribe and tongue and nation. But how do I... Continue Reading

Former emergents (namely, Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, and Rob Bell) argue that everyone has a particular standpoint from which they come to interpret and know the world. Moreover, we are shaped, or “situated,” so deeply by our cultural and familial upbringing, life experiences, historical location, and more that we cannot gain a universal,... Continue Reading

Context matters. If we learn to read the Bible for what it is—and not as a collection of independently assembled proverbial sayings—we’ll discover that some of our most familiar passages don’t actually mean what we’ve always assumed.   Perhaps you’ve heard the injunction to avoid the appearance of evil. You won’t find the phrase in most modern English... Continue Reading