ORGANIZATION OF MANIPULATORS There are people today who believe the deity of Jesus is a myth designed to keep people morally disciplined in a corrupt world, and that the church itself is just an organization of manipulators aiming to make money off people with broken or damaged consciences. I sense this skepticism was generated by… Read More Confronting Church Wounds: The Judgment of a Seat Warmer
ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT PERFECT FAITH Christianity isn’t about perfection. Lots of us hold onto the fallacy that faith means we’re supposed to reflect perfection in some way by means of our belief in God. There’s a reason that’s fallacious—spoiler alert: we never achieve perfection here in this life. The goal is to strive to draw nearer… Read More The Fallacy of Perfection: Growing In Faith, Not Self-Deprecation
THE STOMACHACHE For those of us who’ve spent a large portion of our lives eating unhealthy food on a regular basis, we’ve learned to expect a stomachache; the intestinal discomfort of the gut’s rejection of ingredients our body finds little to no nutritious value in at all. We expect to spend a longer time in… Read More Learning to Deprive Our Soul of What It Doesn’t Need
A WORTHY PERSPECTIVE-SHIFTING ADJUSTMENT Decisions we make—from where we live and who we marry, to what we do for a living and what social circle we invite into our lives—all branch from one thing: whom or what we place our faith in. Where this becomes a conundrum is misunderstanding how faith is used, and its nature, but perhaps… Read More Strong Foundations: Courting Belief & Marrying Faith
PERFECTLY IMPERFECT MESSES God exists. We can see His divine nature in all of creation (Romans 1:20). We see His fingerprints in the way creation has His signature of design on it, rather than “chance” or random chaos. In fact, because there is no such thing as an actual “perfect mess,” one is forced into… Read More Beauty for the Ages: Seeing God With Imperfect Eyes
PROCESS OF ELIMINATING SINS’ WAGES To love God is to honor Him in every area of our lives. This isn’t an easy thing to do… especially when we’re in sin. One reason repentance is so important to talk about as a Christ-follower is that it’s the reason we have such a hard time maintaining or… Read More Roadmap to Repentance in a Field of Apologies
ALL SORTS OF DEATH I think it’s safe to say we’re all affected by death; deaths of loved ones, the death of a season, of a pet, the death of a relationship—death comes for us all, but it’s what death means to us that changes how we experience its toll. A fair number of you… Read More Overflowing Faith from an Uncompromisable Seed
AIMLESS SEARCH If we don’t know what we’re searching for, we won’t find it. To search without a destination is pointless. To seek without the purpose of finding is fruitless and vacuous. Taking the first step of a journey towards nowhere ends before it begins. LACKING STRUCTURED, FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS Many people find themselves in difficult… Read More Placing the Destination of Our Beliefs in the Promise of Jesus
THE CHOICE WE MAKE THAT AFFECTS EVERYONE With Christmas fast approaching, what matters most is no different than what mattered most yesterday: our soul’s eternal destination based on the source of our faith. Each person has this choice to make, and each person does in fact make this choice, each and day every, whether or… Read More What Matters Most at Christmas Isn’t Under the Tree
HORRORS OF A WORLD WITH SIN There is so much suffering in this world. So much suffering. It’s one of the most common reasons unbelievers have put aside considering the existence of a so-called all-loving God. There is so much trauma in life that one wonders how a loving God, with all His wisdom and… Read More When We Suffer: Discipline of the Spirit
