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The Correlation Between Privilege and Pressure
According to a December 2014 article in The Economist, there is a “distinct correlation between privilege and pressure.” We may earn more money, but we can never earn more time. And because we’re work... -
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The Two Runners
The true story of Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, two British sprinters who qualified for the 1924 Olympic Games, illustrates two contrasting approaches to life and identity. Abrahams was driven by ... -
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If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts. -
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Honoring and Leaving
The challenge each of these faced in their deconstruction—and what we may face—is walking the tightrope between becoming our own person and honoring our past. In The Homeless Mind , sociologist P... -
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The Christian who cares only for God’s approval lives free of the tyranny of conformist pressures, relaxed under the steady direction of the God who loves us and gives himself for us. Those who try to... -
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Waiting Forces us To Reckon with the Deep Questions of our Identity
But as we grow older, waiting feels like an inconvenience or affront. We take out our phones when we’re waiting in the grocery store aisle for two minutes. We listen to podcasts on our commute. We lea... -
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Addicted to Putting People In their Place
As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will be filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain a... -
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"The Batman Effect" The Power of Identity
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... -
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Identity and Pastors: Struggle, Success, and the Silent Battle
"Not Against Flesh and Blood..." There is an unspoken battle that every pastor faces—a battle not against flesh and blood , nor merely against the seen forces of ministry challenges, but... -
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The exhausting manipulation and control it takes to protect an identity based on circumstances will crush our hearts and hide the best of who we are behind a wall of insecurity. -
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To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. -
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Adolescence and the Pings, Not Pong
Adolescents have been offered a license to post without any accompanying ethical framework. Is it fair to blame teens for misusing tools that didn’t exist in our childhood? If I had been given a phone... -
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I must register a certain impatience with the faddish equation, never suggested by me, of the term identity with the question, “Who am I?” This question nobody would ask himself except in a more or le... -
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Identity Drives Us
Identity drives motivation, motivation drives action, and action drives results. For example, if someone speeds past me at ninety miles per hour on the highway, odds are I won’t chase them down and is... -
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Expressive Individualism Today
You don’t need to look far today to notice that personal identity is a do-it-yourself project. A gym near where I live advertises itself with the slogan: “Be Fit. Be Well. Be You.” A new apartment com... -
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We are Better Together: Moving from Empire to Kingdom
A Multi-faceted Church Who loses by the church and parachurch’s lack of unity and cooperation? Absolutely everyone : congregations, ministry organizations, ministry leaders, individual believers . .... -
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Understanding Expressive Individualism
A survey in 2015 found that 91 percent of adults in the United States agreed that the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself. Everything else flows from this conviction. The thinking ... -
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In God’s Image
Pop psychology is wrong when it tells you to look inside yourself and find your value. The magazines are wrong when they suggest you are only as good as you are thin, muscular, pimple-free, or perfume... -
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Scripture Guide, Luke 4:1-13
Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? After the Baptism Jesus, still wet from his baptism in the Jordan. Jesus, with the affirmation of the Father still ringing in his ears... -
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Our Manicured Personas
The rise of both video spectacles and marketed consumables is no accidental marriage. Images capture our attention and lure us because they implicitly ask us to try on various costumes of identity, to... -
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The Dead Poet’s Society
The film the Dead Poets Society is set in 1959 at Welton Academy, a strict, elite, all-boys preparatory school. The main character, Todd Anderson, is a shy and insecure student who struggles wit... -
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The open doors left me wanting more . . . It’s another way to win a useless fight You’ve been lying so long don’t know you’re faking. -
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Strengthen Your Core
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... -
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We Need To Hear Our Names
In his wonderful book Run with Horses , Eugene Peterson reminds us of many of the ways in which modern life de-personalizes and degrades us. We become a number and not a name. We are valued for wha... -
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The Anatomy of a Crisis: Sermon Illustration Thursday
All crises are judgments of history that call into question an existing state of affairs. They sift and sort the character and condition of a nation and its capacity to respond. The deeper the crisis,... -
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Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. -
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If you are what you should be, then you will set the world on fire. -
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Becoming the Person God Wants Us to Be
Each one of us is called to live the truth of our unrepeatable uniqueness. We are not meant to model ourselves after others, however wonderful they may be. A delightful Jewish parable makes this point... -
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Why We Fight For Some Causes & Not Others
When an issue is less central to one’s identity it’s possible to feel, for example, “I really should do more to help those in need, but it’s just too hard’ or ‘I just can’t find the time.’ But when th... -
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I take a page from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and I define sin as building your identity—your self-worth and happiness—on anything other than God. Instead of telling them they are sinning b...
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