Too often, Christians think of hypocrites as people who do one thing but feel another. But that's not hypocrisy. Hypocrites publicize one set of beliefs but live by a different set of beliefs. When you come to church but don't feel like it, that's more like faithfulness. When you do the right thing in your…
The Grand Illusion
Most of us tend to live under the illusion that God wouldn't intentionally lead us into such pain [of loss] —especially multiple times. We can't make any sense of why the people and things we love must literally and figuratively experience the finality of death...If we embrace these losses for the severe mercies they are,…
The Overcounseled
Many people with intense problems have been overcounseled, with little evidence of growth and benefit resulting from it. Instead, what is needed is to build faith by saturating the mind with the gospel of grace, so that lives can be built on the presupposition of Christ's atonement and His present availability as a living, loving…
When a Crisis Is Not a Crisis, But Sin
The crisis of leadership in our churches, businesses and governments is largely due to this one dilemma: men have been given power, but they are unprepared to handle it. The time of ruling is a tremendous test of character, for the king will be sorely tested to his influence in humility, for the benefit of…
It All Matters
"We can and must do in the present, if we are obedient to the gospel, if we are following Jesus, and if we are indwelt, energized, and directed by the Spirit, is to build for the kingdom. This brings us back to 1 Corinthians 15:58 once more: what you do in the Lord is not…
The Day of Adversity
It always cost time and money to do justice...And yet there are times when doing justice really costs. These verses talk about a time of trouble--literally, "the day of adversity." In times of crisis, from recession to government coups, the most vulnerable are most endangered, and to defend them puts you in the way of harm as…
When the Church Becomes the World
[Secularization] advances rarely by external opposition but by a gradual process of assimilating the Christian drama, doctrines, doxology, and discipleship to the nihilistic plots of this fading age. The ultimate threat is never that the world will continue to be worldly, reducing reality to human flourishing and immanent frame, but that churches will fail in…
Unchanging and Changing
Just as my assurance of salvation rests in the fact that God cannot change, my hope of sanctification rests in the fact that I can. What a greater disavowal of the gospel of grace than to claim it is capable of changing every sinner's heart but mine? Jen Wilkin, None Like Him
Do vs. Done
The law says, "do this", and it is never done. Grace says, "believe in this", and everything is already done. The first part is clear from what has been stated by the Apostle and his interpreter, St. Augustine, in many places. And it has been stated often enough above that the "law works wrath" and keeps all men…
More than an Underdog
The reason for this persistent story line of the Bible is not simply because the writers like underdogs. It is because the ultimate example of God's working in the world was Jesus Christ, the only founder of a major religion that died in disgrace, not surrounded by all of his loving disciples but abandoned by…
Raising Lazarus 