discipleship on Comfort Zone

Jesus never asks us to do something he wouldn’t do himself. He calls us to a life of faith, not a life of comfort.

The family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations, where the personal, the pri­vate, and the emotional hold sway. Yet. . . that is ...

This is the place and this is the time: here and now God waits to break into our experience: to change our minds, to change our lives, to change our ways; To make us see the world and the ...

The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given,...

[Peter getting out of the boat to walk on water] is about extreme discipleship. …Your boat is whatever represents safety and security to you apart from God himself. Your boat is whatever you are temp...

In a television commercial for Facebook, a large, gregarious family sits down to a meal. It is a Norman Rockwell moment. In our positive associations to family dinner, myth and science come together. ...

Holy God, You call us to a passionate, all-consuming faith. Yet, so frequently, we give You half-hearted obedience or distracted, leftover moments of our time. You tell us that we are the salt of the ...

One saint used to say that she was the type of woman who advances more rapidly when she is drawn by love than when driven by fear. She was perceptive enough to know that we are all that type of person...

The goal in handling dragons is not to destroy them, not merely to disassociate, but to make them disciples. Even when that seems an unlikely prospect.

In the family, life is brought not only to our doorstep, but into our kitchens, bedrooms, and dens. In the family, life is happening all around us, and it begs to be questioned, evaluated, interpreted...

Here Comes the Crowd Though he was challenging and divisive, Jesus always could draw a crowd. Some came because he had miraculously healed the lame or fed thousands. Others were there for the scandal...

The great danger of Christian discipleship is that we should have two religions: a glorious, biblical Sunday gospel that sets us free from the world, that in the cross and resurrection of Christ makes...

Harold Kushner wrote about a very bright, driven pre-med student at a very competitive college. While traveling in the East the summer before his junior year, he met a guru who said, “Don’t you see yo...

George Garrett, a novelist and amateur boxer wrote about a transformation that often takes place for fighters who stick with the sport. Throughout their journey to boxing excellence, in which they mus...

There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of humans, are created, strengthened and maintained.

We are practiced in pleading inadequacy in order to avoid living at the best that God calls us to.

Conversion does not make us perfect, but it does catapult us into a total experience of discipleship that affects - and infects - every sphere of our living.

Preaching Commentary Context The feeding of the 5,000 in Matthew occurs within a section where questions of Jesus’ identity are heightened. Two incorrect answers of who Jesus truly is are given in...

Sometimes to follow in the footsteps of Jesus is to walk away from others or to let them walk away from us.

Beholding beauty produces fascination, and fascination is the best way to transform a person. Consider a young man in love. Parents, professors, mentors, and friends can plead with a young man to chan...

Let us think often that our only business in this life is to please God. Perhaps all besides is but folly and vanity.

Introduction This is a well-known passage full of well-known phrases, and yet reading and meditating on the text continues to offer fresh understandings and applications. John 3:1-17 is the account o...

Context The feeding of the 5,000 in Matthew occurs within a section where questions of Jesus’ identity are heightened. Two incorrect answers of who Jesus truly is are given in 13:55 (“isn’t this the...

Ancient lighting took  Work I remember watching a movie (I think it was The Mummy ) where the protagonists descended into an underground structure built by the ancients. The structure was completel...

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is...

The Christian belongs not in the seclusion of cloistered life but in the thick of foes.

In her excellent book on following Jesus in the suburbs, Ashley Hales describes one of the ways in which our discipleship has been influenced by modern secular trends such as the desire for self-actua...

We’re all tempted to come to Jesus for what we want from him, rather than coming to him for mentoring, training and teaching about what he wants our lives to look like.

One of the first Bible study groups I ever attended was at the Sigma Chi fraternity house at Cornell University. We were a hodgepodge of academics, sorority girls, fraternity boys, star athletes, matu...