They are great stories of God who goes and saves His people out of their bondage. But sometimes, God is a God to us and to our children. Sometimes, He is just keeping His covenant promises. He doesn’t need a Damascus road but, rather puts us in families where, like Timothy, we’ve always known the... Continue Reading

After a few years from my “conversion,” I walked away from the faith in 1986. While I never denounced Christianity or indicated I was no longer a Christian, my line of thinking definitely echoed what I hear Harris and Sampson utter–there was a deconstruction, if you will. But really, it was flat out rebellion.   ... Continue Reading

What I am asking is not a new question. It’s plagued theologians far wiser than me for generations. If we falter in faith, does God still save us? If, in a moment of doubt, we are swept away to face God, does he see the years of faith, the confessions of sin, the profession of... Continue Reading

Go ahead and scroll through your favorite feed and tell me that people aren’t continually berating, belittling, mocking, and smearing each other. They are, and Jesus has a word for that – murder. Matthew 5:21-22 is absolutely clear that anger and name-calling are the fruit of murderous hearts. To avoid confusion let me say, I’m... Continue Reading

I’ve been wanting to get better at scheduling more intentional one-on-one time with each of my children. Life keeps pushing in on my idea, though, and it’s easy to put it off and say “after this week, things will be different” or “this is just a crazy couple of months”, while waiting for some magical... Continue Reading

That night dear Billy got up and started at Genesis and went right through the whole Bible and he talked about every single blood sacrifice you can imagine. The blood was just flowing all through Great St. Mary’s everywhere for three-quarters of an hour. And both my neighbors were terribly embarrassed by this crude proclamation... Continue Reading

If you can think of the worst thing that can happen to one of your members, something even worse may stare at you in the dark of night. The Scriptures call us to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. And if we have any heart at all, we’ll find the empathy... Continue Reading

God intentionally lets us grow hungry so that we realize how desperately we need him. If he does not speak the word, we will perish. If he does not prosper the gospel, it will fail. It’s this same sense of wild-eyed desperation that we hear in the voice of Peter in response to Jesus’s question:... Continue Reading

Christians are called to show good kindness, modelled on God’s kindness. It is a compassion which doesn’t pay things forward, which isn’t interested in personal outcome, which isn’t predicated on the worthiness of the recipient, or their intellectual affinity with us. It is a love which tramples boundaries, which upends expectations, which hands a tunic... Continue Reading

In the premodern Christian tradition, love as an affection could therefore be appropriate or inappropriate, since love could be rightly or wrongly directed. The object of desire determined if it was right to desire such a thing, and necessarily dictated the moral quality of the affection. This changed in the 1700s. In eighteenth-century Germany, a third... Continue Reading