To continue with the theme of calling, I want to point out three things about calling that I believe are essential. First, our calling is not about us. Often times we think that God’s mission in the world is to make people (us) happy. I hate...
A few minutes after the service began, an elderly man entered the rear doors of the small church holding a dog. He quietly slipped into one of the rear pews, hoping to go unnoticed. When the pastor stood to deliver the sermon for the day, he notice...
What is the proper Christian response to terrorism? The Old and New Testament alike can provide for us instruction and counsel in answering that question. Terrorism is not something that is unique to our time in human history. Terrorism is something...
Psalm 113 is the first psalm in a six-psalm collection called the “Egyptian Hallel” (113–118). It is tradition for Jews to recite (or sing) these six psalms around the time of Passover to commemorate the deliverance from Egyptian slavery. This...
Simon Peter arrived just after him. He entered the tomb and saw the linen cloths lying there. — John 20:6 One of the interesting details of the story of the resurrection is the folded linens that they found where Jesus dead body once laid. One can...
There is never a moment when God doesn’t have a plan. This is true both in the big picture, as well as the small. God has a plan for the course of events in history, and God has a plan for the gritty details of each of our lives. Political crisis...
In this post I talked about the illuminating and convicting work of the Holy Spirit in believers. Here, I want to talk about the EMPOWERING work of the Holy Spirit because these two dynamics go together. They workl together in the sense that the...
In this post I talked about how worldview shapes the lens through which we read scripture (i.e., creates our hermeneutical framework). I said that the hermeneutical principle that the “plain meaning of the text is usually the correct meaning...