Musician David Byrne recently advanced an interesting theory about humanity and technology. The overarching agenda of technology, he believes, is intended to eliminate human interaction. The displacement of human beings by modern technology has become so obvious and so widespread that he has been forced to conclude it is more than an unintentional byproduct of…
Sometimes God’s truth goes into your life like a quiet whisper. Sometimes it goes in like a hand grenade. Have you had one of those times? One day you hear a sermon, or you have a conversation with a fellow church member, or maybe a friend confronts you with a sin they’ve seen in your…
I love to review books that are of special interest to Christians. And even when I’m not able to review them, I still love to make people aware of titles that are new and noteworthy. Based on the number of books that are stuffed into my mailbox just about every day, I presume that Christian…
Blogs have come a long way in a short time. Though an early form of blogging existed as early as the 90s, it was not until the early 2000s that the term became widely-used and the medium became widely-adopted. In this way blogging is still in its infancy, though some are convinced it’s also in…
A well-planned worship service is a tremendous blessing to those who participate in it. A well-planned service is not necessarily one in which the projector never flickers and the microphones never buzz, or one in which the transitions are smooth and the sermon doesn’t go long. Rather, a well-planned service is one whose elements have…
Fasting is, by far, the least-appreciated and least-practiced spiritual discipline. There is a curious apathy about a discipline Jesus assumed his followers would practice. After all, just as he gave instruction on prayer prefaced by the words “And when [not if] you pray…,” he gave instruction on fasting prefaced by “And when you fast…” Both…
A few weeks ago I asked Will You Write a Mother’s Day Tribute?. Many people took up the challenge and today I want to share some of them. I asked people to mark their Mother’s Day tributes with the hashtag #dearmom17, so what I list here are drawn from articles listed with that hashtag on…
Dear Mom, We don’t really do this stuff, do we? We don’t often feel the need to say what we assume the other person already knows. It’s that British reserve, I suspect. But on this Mother’s Day, I want to tell just some of what you mean to me, and I’ll do it through a…
Systematic theology is the discipline of looking to the entire Bible to determine what God says about a given topic. It answers the question “What does the whole Bible say about __________ [fill in the blank]?” It is a logical, systematic way of organizing truth. To be skillful, accurate theologians, we need systematic theology, but…
God’s people had rejected God’s prophet. For many years, Samuel had served the nation of Israel. Though his sons had proven wayward, he himself had remained faithful. He had served well. He had spoken the words of God to the nation. He had appointed judges to govern them. But still the day came when the…
It is a display of God’s wisdom that he binds us together in local church communities. We know it is a mark of his wisdom, yet sometimes it can feel so much like folly. Sometimes we grow weary of being around people who are sinful, who are selfish, who still have so far to go.…
Our lives are short. They are, in the words of the author of Ecclesiastes, little more than vapor, dust blow by the wind. Yet the very thought that could dismay or depress you, can also motivate you. Here are some blessings that will be yours when you pause to consider your short little life. Considering…
One of the hardest tasks for every Christian is to deeply believe and forever remember that we’ve been saved by grace. This is a lifelong challenge because our natural tendency is always to veer back to merit, to assume that we’ve been saved by something we are, something we’ve got, or something we’ve accomplished. Grace—unmerited…
Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, is like any other business leader in that he is constantly challenged with the question of competition: Who is the competition, and what do you plan to do about them? He was asked this question a week ago during the regularly-scheduled Q1 earnings call, and his answer is both fascinating…
According to a new study by Gallup, the hottest thing at church today is not the worship and not the pastor. It’s not the smoke and lights and it’s not the hip and relevant youth programs. It’s not even the organic, fair trade coffee at the cafe. The hottest thing at church today is the…
We are a culture of convenience, of personalization, of individualism. We have a million ways of customizing our lives to perfectly suit our every preference. When things are difficult, we think little of pulling away from responsibilities, of reorienting our lives away from whatever causes inconvenience. This can even extend to something as good and…
We know that pornography is an ugly and harmful sin. We know that those who indulge in porn have committed the sin of lust, but there is so much more to it than that. When you open your browser and begin to look at those images and videos, you are sinning in ways that go…
A friend of mine recently became a citizen of the United States of America. Until that point, he had been a mere resident, a visitor, a sojourner, a citizen of some other place. But he followed the process, he fulfilled his obligations, and he at last received the decision of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration…
Today I want to tell a story. It’s not my story, though I do make a couple of brief appearances along the way. It’s actually a story about a church, and if it’s a story about a church, it must first be a story about Jesus. After all, every church is his church. To tell…
A few weeks ago I wrote an article titled What We Lost When We Lost Our Hymnals and was rather surprised to see 300,000 people stop by to read it! I meant to point out that there are consequences in shifting from one medium to another—in this case, shifting from hymnals to PowerPoint projection. (I…