living life on Upside-Down Kingdom

The Christian life is a great paradox. Those who die to self, find self. Those who die to their cravings will receive many times as much in this age, and, in the age to come, eternal life (Luke 18:29)...

We all live between two worlds. We are planted here on earth while our hope is in heaven. We are given work to do in temporary soil that, we’re told, has the potential to spring up into unending fruit...

Your life is in the pulpit with you Fred Craddock said, “Not everything that’s in the Bible is in the Bible .” That’s why we have, among other things, commentaries . The most helpful ones throw o...

I freely admit that real Christianity . . . goes much nearer to Dualism than people think. . . . The difference is that Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was...

Our gracious God, you come to us in the everyday.  You give us your Word and your Spirit so that we can hear your voice and follow your ways. We confess that we have neglected your Word and the Sp...

The birth of the child into the darkness of the world made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it.

Almighty God, we trust in our own strength, abilities, and resources. We think too highly of what we have to offer this world. The truth is we cannot do anything without your strength and all we have ...

Our mistake is to think that following Jesus consists in loving our enemies, going the ‘second mile,’ turning the other cheek, suffering patiently and hopefully—while living the rest of our lives just...

Paul tells the bride in Ephesians 6:10-12 that her enemies are 'not...flesh and blood,' but the unseen spiritual forces of evil and darkness. She is called to arm herself for battle, to 'b...

Satan is a liar. He wants to steal our joy and replace it with hopelessness. When we're up against a struggle and we think we can't keep going, we can change that by praising God. Our chains w...

Gracious God, we desire to follow when your call. We long to live according to the ways of Jesus, yet we find ourselves stumbling. Forgive us for the times we have failed to follow your example of com...

I have a friend who says he wants to write a book on the life of Jesus and call it “a theology of interruptions.” Because, he says, so many of the things that Jesus said or did in the Gospel stories h...

Adapted from Ch 4 of On Getting out of Bed. Why is Existence Good? Living for the sake of living—doing things so that you can continue to efficiently do things—begs the question, Why live? To live...

Our family is radical, but we are definitely not Amish—although we love to eat the fruit, vegetables, meat, and cheese produced by our Amish neighbors forty miles away in Lancaster County, Pennsylvani...

Gracious Father, too often we base our worth on our performance. We believe if we do well, your love grows, and if we falter, your love lessens. Our God, how far this is from the truth. We confess our...

The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day.

It's in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous.

If you see a thing whole—it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life is a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You ne...

Evil and suffering are real . . . They aren’t an illusion, nor are they simply an absence of good. We are fallen creatures living in a fallen world that has been twisted and corrupted by sin, and we a...

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

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...

I like to describe spiritual leadership as living a grace-paced life in the midst of a driven culture; living at a vital, life-giving, peaceful pace while remaining engaged and active in the kingdom w...

Christians don't simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all th...

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...

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

On retreat we stop avoiding the pain of the disconnect between our deepest desires and the way we are actually living. We have time and space to reflect on our life rhythms to see if they are really w...

Faith is a how and, more specifically, a way of living in light of an event.

[T]here are only two stories that make any difference—God’s story and the human story. We all are living out different versions of those two stories with an infinite number of variations. God’s story,...

The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to the divine wonder of living is the root of sin.

The boundary between living and nonliving is actually removed in food. Food is natural communion – partaking of the flesh of the world. When I take food, I am eating world matter in general, and in so...