psalms on Spiritual Gifts

Context — Community First It’s important to remember that, like many cultures in the world today, Paul’s context is community-oriented. This is often hard for Americans to truly grasp. We are focuse...

Dangerous levels of exhaustion usually accumulate over a longer period of time in which we are consistently living beyond human limits, functioning outside our giftedness, or not paying attention to t...

Context — Community First It’s important to remember that, like many cultures in the world today, Paul’s context is community-oriented. This is often hard for Americans to truly grasp. We are focuse...

O Holy Spirit, you guide us and lead us to Jesus. You show us we are co-heirs with Christ. However, we do not follow your leadership. We refuse to live as children of God. We live selfishly, out of fe...

I grew up in church. However, this church was part of a denomination that avoided mentioning the Holy Spirit whenever possible. Our denominational leaders treated Him a bit like the crazy uncle who sh...

In an old joke, people refer to seminary as cemetery. Attending one does feel like that at times, so the last thing I expected to discover in a dingy classroom in the basement of a Pasadena seminary s...

The soul can be difficult to define. The great theologian Karl Barth confessed, “We shall search the Old and New Testaments in vain for a theory of the relation between the soul and body.” Your soul i...

Leader: Oh God, You have been so gracious to us. You have given us so many wonderful gifts—they outnumber the stars in the sky! You have kept Your promises to us, and You have been faithful!  Peop...

When Tara and I learned we were pregnant for the first time, we went right out and bought a crib. You might have done the same. The act of selecting, purchasing, and assembling a crib is deeply cathar...

I (Josh) know a young man named Mark who was on the brink of self-destruction. He partied away his first semester of junior college and was later kicked out of school. He was devastated by his loss an...