Being half-distracted seems better than being fully inattentive to God, though, right? But the Lord will not be treated like a beggar, happy to have the scraps of our thought life only after we’ve offered up the best of our focus and affections to media and advertisers. He wants it all. Our failure to devote our... Continue Reading

Jesus who became an untouchable – the untouchable – for us. Then most gloriously, there is the final day touch, when we are told in Revelation 21 that God himself will wipe every tear from the eyes of his people.  He won’t send an angel down with a tissue to do the dirty work for Him.... Continue Reading

Celebrities and Twitterverse Titans define acceptable thought and behavior, and others thoughtlessly follow. Therefore, we need good intellectual defenses, ones that keep us from eating intellectual junk food. To a similar end, Chesterton writes, “Philosophy is merely thought that has been thought out,” and he allows: “It is often a great bore.” But then again,... Continue Reading

Are your days spent bouncing from one toddler tantrum to the next? Eyes up. Persevere, momma. Do the hard work. Make disciples in your home. Train these littles in the ways of the Lord. Is some other person living the life you want? Eyes up. Be thankful and be faithful where God has placed you.... Continue Reading

In the OT, angels occasionally protected people from death in some way (e.g., Gen 19:12–14; Dan 6:22) and were thus “ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation” (Heb 1:14). An angel like Michael can have “charge” of a nation (Dan 12:1), and Jesus said that children... Continue Reading

The great Puritans were as humble-minded and warm-hearted they were clear-headed, as fully oriented to people as they were to Scripture, and as passionate for peace as they were for truth. They would certainly have diagnosed today’s fixated Christian intellectualists as spiritually stunted, not in their zeal for the form of sound words but in... Continue Reading

Beauty offers us a Christian way of knowing reality. It does something unexpected: it accepts as true what postmoderns say about the Enlightenment view of knowledge, but it simultaneously rejects postmodernism’s nihilism. Beauty concedes both the subjective aspect of human knowledge and an objective basis for that knowledge in reality outside of the subject. The world... Continue Reading

Because we are sinful, our minds tend to drift toward comparison. If you have a house, you tend to compare your house to someone else’s. If you take a vacation, you tend to compare your vacation to someone else’s. Clothing, restaurant choices, vehicles – these are all sources for comparison. And so is our suffering.... Continue Reading

The leaving out of Tolkien’s faith is a convicting wake-up call to us, the confessing church. And this reason may be true of other public slights of the Christian faith, too. It may not be because the unbelieving media is attacking Christianity. They instead might just have witnessed Christians use Christianity as a means to... Continue Reading

When your missionaries come into town, know that their struggles are real. They are broken sinners in need of the message they are bringing to others and they need encouragement. Missionary envy is real. Remember that they have their own issues of envy with you, just like you might envy them for their courage, their... Continue Reading