Before Seattle resident Edith Macefield died at age eighty-six in 2008, she refused to sell her house to developers for the $1 million they had purportedly offered. Macefield wanted to die at home. Se...
A. Parnell Bailey visited an orange grove where an irrigation pump had broken down. The season was unusually dry and some of the trees were beginning to die for lack of water. The man giving the tour ...
Ephesians 3:16-17, Colossians 2:6-7, John 15:5, Jeremiah 17:7-8, Psalm 1:1-3
A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I made the long drive from San Antonio, Texas, to Pasadena, California, where we now reside. We passed through hundreds of miles of southwestern desert, most of whic...
Did you know that the history of the word “fellowship,” is, rather simply, a relationship among fellows? The idea of a fellowship being that two or more people have been bonded together in some signif...
Jeremiah 17:7-8, Colossians 2:6-7, Psalm 1:3, Ephesians 3:16-19, Matthew 13:3-8, Mark 4:1-9
The word radical comes from the same root as the word radish and literally means “root.” It’s truly a root word! But apart from the painful pun, it has something to teach us. So often, when we think o...
1 Peter 1:23, John 15:3, 2 Corinthians 5:17, Colossians 2:13-14, Isaiah 1:18
Our sins had taken root deeply, down to the deepest soils of our hearts. Know that Christ has uprooted our sins to the last fiber, planting His Word of forgiveness that can never wither.
In his excellent book, An Unhurried Life, Alan Fadling contrasts our overly busy lives with a vision of the kingdom from Isaiah chapter 61: Isaiah envisioned a kingdom in which those people in need ...
Galatians 5:22-23, Ruth 1:16, Luke 10:38-42, Luke 10:25-37, Colossians 3:17, 1 John 3:18, Matthew 22:37-40
Identities—what makes us who we are, the kind of people we are—is what we love. More specifically, our identity is shaped by what we ultimately love or what we love as ultimate—what, at the end of the...
People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all themselves. But in fact they are invariably the benefici...
You can only build an effective Christian life when you have a “settled core”: an inner self “hidden with Christ” (Colossians 3:3). When you go to the gym or a Pilates class, your instructor might enc...
In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel reflects on the Biblical doctrine...
Colossians 1:6, Matthew 13:24-30, John 12:24, Luke 13:20-21, Luke 13:18-19, Matthew 13:33, Matthew 13:31-32
Jesus made clear that the Kingdom of God is organic and not organizational. It grows like a seed and it works like leaven: secretly, invisibly, surprisingly, and irresistibly.
What we need to realize, however, is that there is no such thing as autonomous or “self-grounding” knowledge. All systems of interpretation and all claims to true knowledge are ultimately grounded out...
Colossians 3:23-24, Galatians 6:9-10, Philippians 2:4, Matthew 5:16, Proverbs 31:8-9, James 1:27
Brandon and Faith Lee, who started Bird and Branch Coffee, are what faithful witnesses look like. When they sat down across from my wife and me, they had a dream to start a coffee shop that would serv...
Relational congruence is the ability to be fundamentally the same person with the same values in every relationship, in every circumstance and especially amidst crisis. It is the internal capacity to ...
In their excellent book, Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the foundation of life as being spiritual in nature. This means we are constantly be “form...
1 John 2:17, Romans 8:38-39, Philippians 3:20, Colossians 3:1-2, John 15:5, Jeremiah 17:7-8
A Tree in Which to Perch An impressive California Sycamore tree used to grace our village. It rose majestically by the water’s edge, a few yards away from the wooden bridge that spans the lake whi...
Context of Galatians I still remember my intro to New Testament class in college and the professor discussing Paul’s letter to the Galatians. All of Paul’s other letters begin with words of adoration...
John 18:36, Romans 14:17, Mark 4:26-29, Colossians 1:13, John 3:3, Matthew 13:33
Continually, Jesus described the Kingdom in terms that one can’t point to and identify specifically—but in every story, the Kingdom was the essential piece. The Kingdom is mixed in and present already...
Long since on Mars and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and both from fact was purely terrestrial-was part and parce...
Matthew 22:37-39, 1 Corinthians 8:1-3, Ezekiel 36:26-27, Colossians 1:9-10, Philippians 3:10-14, James 1:22, John 14:21
In a journal entry by the Danish Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the great existentialist philosopher describes the importance not simply of grasping the truth of the Christian faith, but having the tr...
Every person in Scripture lived out a personal story incarnated by an even greater story about God, life, and the world. That story came from the politics, theology, and culture ingrained in their mem...
Jeremiah 17:7–8, Deuteronomy 30:19–20, Ezekiel 36:26–27, John 15:4–5, Romans 7:4–6, Psalm 1:2–3, John 15:1-8, Matthew 7:17-23, Galatians 5:22-23, Colossians 1:10, Galatians 5:22-23
Why does a tree bear fruit? Not because there is some law of nature that says it must. But simply because of the life within it, rising up from the soil and water that feed its roots and flowing in th...
John 14:6, Philippians 3:8, Ephesians 2:13, 1 John 1:3, John 10:10, Hebrews 1:3, Colossians 1:15-17
Christianity at its core is not about subscription to a theological system or the authority of a sacred text or ethical perspectives, although they are all important. Christianity at its core is about...
A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...
The basis of life is people and how they relate to each other. Our success, fulfillment, and happiness depend upon our ability to relate effectively. The best way to become a person that others are dr...
Christians are often accused of two wrong-headed views of the body. One is that we ignore the body in favor of a disembodied, spirits-floating-on-clouds spirituality. The other is that we are obsessed...