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The Velveteen Christian
Our world is made up of a constant cacophony of voices. Truth, lies, myths, imaginations, and opinions fill our world with dissidence and confusion. We have information overload. It is difficult to discern who can be trusted because of the spin, the agendas, the omitted facts or the inserted insinuations that twist and distort. I grew up during the sex revolution. A whole generation believed that being real was living without restraints. Getting what you wanted, as much as you wanted, whenever you wanted it. No strings attached defined love for those who bought into the free love movement. Easter is coming soon and as I prepare my heart to…
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Praying for the Impossible
I was recently convicted about the power of prayer. Reading through the book of Acts, I came to the story of Peter’s imprisonment. If you’re just skimming your reading or you have read the story many times over, it’s tempting to take this moment for granted. With a fresh glance, I was struck by this encounter in the early church and all that it implies for my life and yours. The infamous King Herod was at it yet again. Actually, this time it wasn’t Herod the Great, the famous King who slaughtered many children, hoping to find baby Jesus among the carnage; this was one of King Herod’s legacies, his…
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Tips for Teaching #1
I want to share some tips that will hopefully help us better prepare our children for the difficulties of standing strong in the faith. Encourage children to ask the hard questions. If they aren’t asking, ask them! Teach them how to wrestle with the Word of God to find the answers. We tend to shy away from the questions that are hard to answer or maybe can’t really be answered. Learning that we can’t demand answers but must be humbly thankful for the revelations God gives is a hard lesson to teach and even harder to learn. I was recently talking with a woman who grew up in a Christian…
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I Shall Not Want
“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” This quote from Dickens’ best describes my memories of summer days as a child. I could hardly wait for summer vacation. No school! No homework! The whole day to play. It was truly the best of times. No sooner was school out than the days became too hot to do much of anything. Friends went away on vacation or away to camp. I quickly became bored with no where to go and nothing fun to do. It was also the worst of times. Sitting in a class room on a warm May day looking out the window as…
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Your Life through the Keyhole
Have you ever seen a really old door on a house or stone wall with the thick iron hardware that creeks every time it opens? Back in the day, big heavy doors stood as formidable barriers that couldn’t be breached by force. Yet many of these doors were no match for prying eyes. The huge iron keys required to unlock the latches were so wide that you could actually put your eye up to the keyhole and look through to the other side. Nowadays we have small metal slits for slender keys, and sometimes only touch pads, so we can’t peer through keyholes to catch a glimpse of something beyond.…
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What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Some would argue that a loving personal God could not allow the existence of evil and social injustice. Others blame an omnipotent God for malignancies like terrorism and the trafficking of young girls for sexual slavery. God foreknew evil. By the act of creation, God instilled evil's feasibility. But does that make Him responsible for it? Not according to 1 John 2:16. Enter: Free Will. Some may scoff at the notion, as if by supplying it God has given us license to misbehave. But free will does not hinder God’s ability to encroach upon choice. He can stop the madness anytime he chooses. And let’s not forget Jesus Christ—the one…
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The Origin of Evil
When did evil and sin enter the world? In the Garden of Eden? And who created evil? Some blame God for temptation and evil by default since he created everything. But let’s rewind. In a galaxy far far away, God created all the angels all at once. And they lived in the stellar places amongst the stars. (Since this is just a blog post and not a seminary paper, I’ll let you verify those gems on your own. A good Systematic Theology text should suffice.) Now because God only creates “good” and “very good,” he made each angel good, or what some would call “holy.” But Jude 1:6 says,…
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WAITING WELL
Have you set some New Year Resolutions? How long will you persevere before giving up and returning to the old habits? If you are like me, you have a life time of unfulfilled resolutions and only a few that you actually accomplished. I think often that life is a journey. And when you set out on a journey the one thing that you know for sure is that there will be a period of waiting. There is no, “Beam me up Scotty!” We are all slowly traveling toward our Heavenly destination. And no matter how impatient we are to get there. Even as we progress toward our destination we have…
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1 Way Parenthood Is Like Noah’s Life of Faith
Judah, my middle child, is a rocks, sticks, leaves, tree-climbing kind of boy. On one of our Fall walks a couple years ago, He picked up an acorn and with an excited smile, said, “Look!” As he handed them to me for safe keeping. What I thought were simple, brown acorns, the kind with tops that look like hats, he thought were beautiful seeds of possibility. A Simple Seed I began to think about how I felt like that acorn. Tossed. Un-noticed. Set-aside from the hustle of busy, important people, going to busy, important places, doing busy, important things. Did my holding a fist full of acorns matter? But then,…
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You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat It Too
We have all heard the saying, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too,” but most of us don’t really live like we believe it. There are so many areas of our life where we try to live life without any consequence. That is after all the implication. If you eat the cake now, the end consequence is that you won’t have it later. Could there be an area of greater need to believe this truth than the area of our imaginations? I think not. Imagination is a wonderful gift from God. It is the place where most of us live. Ted Dekker, in his book, The Slumber of…
