Not every thought makes a good article and sometimes an entire article can be distilled down to a single thought. For those reasons, I like to occasionally create what I have created here–a roundup of brief, random thoughts about Christian living. Some of these are original and some are drawn from articles I’ve written in the past. I hope there’s something here that is helpful to you.
In all likelihood, no one will ever sin against you more frequently than your spouse. It would be wise, then, to marry a person who knows when and how to ask forgiveness. In the same way, you will never sin against anyone more frequently than your spouse. It would be wise, then, to marry a person who knows when and how to extend forgiveness.
The man who desires sole authority within the local church and is convinced he can handle it proves that he is unworthy of having not only sole authority but any authority at all. Such a man is not fit for leadership.
The church is in desperate need of elders, yet there are surprisingly few men who exist at that point where willingness meets qualification. There are almost always some who are willing but not qualified and some who are qualified but not willing. What the church needs so badly is men who are both. Thus if you are willing, pray that God would make you qualified and if you are qualified, pray that God would make you willing!
It is wonderful to plan to be kind to another person tomorrow, but it is better by far to be kind to that person today. Today’s opportunity for kindness is the one the Lord has presented to you and means for you to fully embrace.
God has gifted you in the ways he deems right and put the calling upon you to fan those gifts into flame. You don’t need to concern yourself with what he has given others, nor be resentful of what he has kept from you, but to simply trust his wisdom in both the giving and the withholding. You need to accept it all—the parts you love and the parts you don’t care for, the parts you would have chosen anyway, and the parts you would have fled from. You need to accept it all and steward it with faithfulness.
There are not many philanthropists who are in the business of designing apps. It is safe to assume that each one of your apps is meant to extract some kind of cost from you and provide some kind of benefit to somebody else.
In all your sorrows and all your afflictions, in your trials and all your losses, you can have confidence that God never means to destroy you and never means to ultimately harm you. To the contrary, he means to purify you and use you, to expand your capacity to love, to prepare and equip you for greater service. It is always his will that you pass through those fires refined but unburned, purified but unharmed, sanctified but unscarred. For God uses them all for good.
It is good to consider God’s joy in the deeds you do, but you should also consider God’s joy in who and what you become. Perhaps the best gift you can bring to God is not a list of good deeds, but evidence of a character that has become transformed to the image of Jesus Christ. The deeds will follow the character.
The time for you to quit lifting your petitions is the time when God tells you that he will no longer listen. The day to give up praying is the day when God tells you that he has closed his ears and become deaf to your voice. The moment to stop pleading is the moment when God assures you that his heart is now hardened and his hand, once opened to supply your needs, is now closed to cut them off. Until that day—a day that will never come—continue to pray, trusting that God continues to listen and to provide.
I have heard a thousand children express their gratitude for a father who loved them and cared for their mother, who led his family well, and who worked hard to provide for them. I have yet to hear of a child who expressed gratitude that his father had set aside any of that to pursue his dreams. A man’s first duty is not to himself but to his family and not to his own fulfillment but to theirs.
When you face hardships, you invariably long to overcome them. You want to get past them, through them, over them, around them—whatever it takes for them to come to as quick an end as possible. Yet it does not take long in the Christian life to learn that God means for you to get something from your hardships—he wants you to gain something precious and obtain something valuable. And sometimes this means the hardships will persist for a long time or even for the rest of your days on earth.
The sin or failure of a public Christian figure represents an opportunity that many cannot resist—an opportunity to leverage that tragedy for their own purposes. Be careful of the articles you read and the videos you watch following such a calamity. Many are glad to build their own platform over the shattered remnants of someone else’s.
Terms like “introvert” and “extrovert” may be helpful descriptors of personality types, but they should never be used as an excuse to neglect opportunities to love and serve others. Whether introverted or extroverted, be dutiful in all God calls you to, even when it cuts against the grain.
When you find yourself at a decision-making crossroads and long to know how to best serve God, you will most often find your answer at the point where Scripture, desire, and circumstance meet.
Many of the ways God calls you to serve him contradict your natural desires rather than harmonize with them. God is able and often eager to ask you to do difficult things and that push you well outside your natural capacities. For that reason, you should be prayerfully willing to serve where there is a need, not just where you believe God has given a gift, for it often seems that God gives the gift with the calling, rather than the calling with the gift.
One gift any wife can give her husband is this: Simply trust him when he says, “You’re beautiful” and believe him when he says, “You’re sexy.” Your marriage will be better for it.
While many cultural conventions dictate the importance of establishing a certain level of wealth or achieving a certain level of vocational success before getting married, the Bible does not. You can get married without owning a home or beginning your first career. You can even get married before finishing college. There will certainly be matters of wisdom to consider, but God nowhere forbids or warns against it. It may take a lot less than you think it does to survive quite happily together.
People today often speak of pornography as if it is the training ground for sex, a kind of classroom for the innocent and naive. Yet watching pornography teaches you nothing useful about sex and nothing helpful about God’s purposes in it. Rather, pornography teaches only selfishness, abuse, exploitation, degradation, and destruction. Avoid it at all costs and purge your mind of all you think you’ve learned from it.
A dutiful introvert is one who acknowledges and accepts what is true about himself but also determines he will never let it interfere with his duty before the Lord. He will not pretend he is an extrovert or stop valuing times of solitude, but he will also not allow his personality to excuse any failure to fulfill the opportunities God presents to him.
Smartphones are not designed to be used sparingly. To the contrary, the devices and their apps have been deliberately designed to be used constantly. To give someone an iPhone and expect them to use it sparingly is like giving someone a bag of chips and expecting them to eat just one, or like giving them a Ferrari and expecting them to only ever drive it at a crawl. It may be a nice thought, but it’s not a realistic one.
Nobody and nothing can make you sin. You sin only through an active act of the will. Not only that, but you sin only because you fail to take hold of the help the Holy Spirit has offered you in that very moment.
When we talk about modesty we usually speak about the way people present themselves in public with their dress or demeanor, with their words or their actions. We concern ourselves with the immodest ways people may draw attention to themselves, whether to their bodies, their wealth, their power, or any other attribute. But no sin has just one side. If one side of modesty is refusing to display what should remain private, the other side is refusing to pay attention to what is not our concern. Often a concern for modesty means we ought to look away.
Not every man can or should be an elder, but every man can and should aspire to have the character of an elder, for this is simply the character of Christ. If you are already willing, then strive to become qualified.
Every journey begins with a single step and that is true of so many of those who leave the church. They leave by inches. They leave without meaning to. They leave because they have not been adequately cautioned about the coming challenges—that what seems like a time of exciting new experiences and new starts, may actually be a time of unintentional dechurching and inadvertent deconstruction.
There is something deep within the heart of man that honors the beauty of sacrifice and for that reason, every man harbors dreams of going down in a great blaze of glory, of giving up safety and security for the sake of those he is called to love and protect. Most will never have the opportunity. But every man can live his life in a blaze of service. If you dream of dying for them, why not live for them? If you dream of sacrificing your life, why not give up your life day by day for them?
