I invite you to explore an imperfect allegory. Imagine you live in a small town somewhere cold and that you have a friend named Stacy. Both of you work hard at a printing company, but you’re not paid well and you live month to month. The added difficulty for Stacy comes from being a single mother to three kids. Keeping them fed, clothed, and a roof over their heads requires a great deal of thriftiness. Sometimes, they scrape by on…
Have you ever tried to cut something with a dull blade? It never tends to go well for me. All of my attempts end in lackluster results, frustration, or defeat. I’ve experienced a similar problem when it comes to my conscience. It’s something which is supposed to help me cut through sticky situations. This cut should help me make the correct separation between right and wrong. Last week I discovered it has been failing at this job in one part…
We live in a dark world. Darkness is on the move in the world at large, in the people around us, and in our own hearts. Christians are dying abroad and at home while sin wages a constant war on our relationships. All the while, I have a daily wrestling match with the false assumptions that I deserve certain luxuries or that I understand things better than other people or even God. It’s overwhelming when all of this comes together…
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about the spiritual disciplines and talked about how I planned on writing a series of blogs about them. When I attempted to tackle the first of the three spiritual disciplines, quiet times, I found myself writing a couple blogs about the Bible. Those blogs technically dealt with the subject of quiet times, but they didn’t really bring to light why quiet times are important or rewarding. In this blog I want to…
In my first blog about the Bible, I talked about how the Bible can be a buzz kill, but I don’t want you to think that reading the Bible is mostly a negative experience. The Bible is one of God’s greatest expressions of love towards us and it can play a vital role in shaping our understanding of that love. The Bible takes our impersonal understanding of God’s love and makes it personal. For the first few years that I…
For most of my walk with Christ, I’ve seen the Bible as a real buzz kill. I’ve seen it this way because I wanted the Bible to make me feel better about myself and that never seemed to work. The Bible spends a good deal of time talking about how God’s children drop the ball, and that really disrupts my attempts to build myself up. That’s actually good news because if the Bible didn’t point to my flaws, and His perfection…