truth on Complaining

Most Holy Lord, we speak with eloquence, but have no love. We speak truth to power, pontificate, and smugly consider our knowledge superior to others, but display little to no charity. We give sacrifi...

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.

I once had the opportunity to speak briefly to a large Mormon audience at the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. I told them that I feel badly about the fact that we evangelicals often tell Mormons what th...

If you’ve ever watched a war movie, or a film that takes place in the military, you’re likely to have encountered a specific scene, in which a subordinate will have something to tell a senior officer ...

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.

Holy and merciful God, we need Your grace and love today. We deliberately lie and speak falsehoods. We mislead and deceive with half-truths. We omit facts that make us look bad. We take pleasure in go...

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

The church must suffer for speaking the truth, for pointing out sin, for uprooting sin. No one wants to have a sore spot touched, and therefore a society with so many sores twitches when someone has t...

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

In his book, Soul Keeping, pastor John Ortberg describes his mentorship by Dallas Willard early in his ministry. The following vignette occurred while Willard was teaching a philosphy course at the Un...

Prayer of Adoration Great God our Father: You are good and You are strong. You are faithful and true, and You won’t tempt or lie to us. In a world that appeals to our sinful cravings and dominated b...

Pastor: Hear my prayer, O Lord; People: listen to my cry for mercy. Pastor: In the day of my trouble I will call to You, People: for You will answer me.  Silent reflecti...

Creeds must disagree: it is the whole fun of the thing. If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue politely, we may argue h...

Prayer of Adoration Gracious God – our Father: Sufficient and sovereign, yet, compassionate and kind; You tell us the truth while the world lies to us; You give us light and hope, while all around u...

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.

When the movie The Da Vinci Code hit the theaters and the swirl of related controversy began to pick up speed, I decided finally to read the book so that I wouldn’t be found ignorant dinner parties. I...

In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair...the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothi...

For years Kyle and I [Jamin Goggin] had no trouble looking critically upon others in their quest for power. We bemoaned the rock-star pastors who were in the spotlight, whose churches appeared to be m...

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was mean...

Gracious God, forgive us when we fail to look honestly at ourselves. It is easy to minimize and justify our sin, believing we can appease our guilt. We are afraid, thinking it is up to us to remove ou...

Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

Tell truth, and shame the devil.

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...

We have an outdoor church readerboard (yep, manual, press-in-the-grooves-black-plastic-letters) near a busy street that I enjoy changing every couple of weeks. The challenge of saying something meanin...

The following story is a great analogy to what life is like before we find we experience the eternal truth of the gospel. In Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Richard Dreyfuss’s...

The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.

There’s a somewhat naïve belief among some that, in general, most people are inherently good. While many Christians may not fully embrace John Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity (which I believe is ...

Paradox has been defined as “Truth standing on her head to attract attention."

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.