Pursuing a holistic expression of Christian faith that is true to the Bible and applicable for today’s world.
Segregating the Two Sides of Christmas Is Christmas an important holiday to you? I suspect you’ll say, “yes.” And if you follow Jesus, you may say Christmas is the most important holiday because it celebrates his birth some 2,000 years ago. That’s when Jesus came to earth to live among us and die in our […]
Anticipating the Arrival of Baby Jesus I don’t really think of Christmas Eve as a holiday as much as the prelude to one. Yet there is—or should be—a spiritual reason to celebrate Christmas Eve. Anticipating Christmas As a child I looked forward to Christmas Day with much excitement. On Christmas Eve I found it hard […]
Make God Your Number One Priority When asked which commandment was the greatest, Jesus said we’re to love God with all our heart, our soul, and our strength (Mark 12:29-31, quoting Deuteronomy 6:4-5). We’re to love him more than anything else, to make him our number one priority. And when we understand God as referring […]
Embrace Annual Cycles of Worship to Provide a Regular Rhythm to Our Faith Journey Some churches follow a church calendar throughout the year to guide them into seasons of worship. This provides an annual rhythm to their embrace of God. Other churches are less structured in their approach, focusing on two major biblical holidays: Christmas […]
Three Easy Ideas If the Word Evangelism Scares You In the post Are You Reluctant to Invite Friends to Church? we looked at the New Testament church and saw that people first invited others to follow Jesus. Then they went to church. Therefore, we shouldn’t invite people to go to church with us until after […]
The Service Members Want Isn’t What the Unchurched Needs Over the years I’ve wanted to invite friends to church. Too often I don’t. This isn’t due to a lack of courage on my part but a fear that the church service would drive them from Jesus instead of drawing them closer. For those times I […]
Righteousness is Another Word for Integrity Someone once surprised me, catching me off guard by calling me a “man of integrity.” Though honored by their perception, I shook my head. Yes, I aspire to be a person of integrity, but I’m not there. I have a long way to go and will never fully arrive. […]
Everyone Can Hear from God People sometimes ask me how I hear from God, and I share with them about when I learned to do this. Yet there were some basic steps I already had in place before I started down this path. I don’t do these perfectly, but I do lean into them and […]
When Christ Speaks, We Should Be Ready to Listen What Jesus says is important to us as his followers. The passages in the Bible that we need to pay the most attention to are the words of Jesus. Some Bibles even highlight Jesus’s words by putting them in red. We call these red-letter editions. People […]
The World’s Understanding of Hope Pales in Comparison to the Bible’s As followers of Jesus, we put our hope in him. But what does it mean to hope? The world’s understanding of hope isn’t very comforting. And the dictionary doesn’t do so well at aligning its definition with how Scripture uses the word. Hoping Is […]