It was one of the darkest chapters in Jewish history. Zedekiah had chosen to rebel against his Babylonian overlords, and King Nebuchadnezzar’s retribution was swift and sure. He besieged Jerusalem and captured it. He burned the temple, he burned the king’s palace, he burned all the mighty houses. He broke down the walls and left…
I wonder if you have ever noticed that Christian books authored by women tend to be written for women, while Christian books authored by men tend to be written for both men and women. Books authored by women tend to have feminine covers, while books authored by men tend to have neutral, not masculine, covers.…
I look forward to the day we own our house free and clear. We have been making payments on the mortgage since the day we moved in, but the end is finally in sight and four or five years from now we should be done at last. (An advantage of buying a small house and…
I once read a memoir by a man who, as a teen, had been a Shabbos goy. A Shabbos goy is a non-Jew who performs some of the Sabbath-day functions that that are forbidden to the devout. Traditionally, a Shabbos goy would extinguish candles and lights, or he would stoke up a fire on a…
Today we celebrate the events that marked the beginning of Jesus’s life: The angelic announcement, the virgin conception, the difficult birth, the unexpected visits, the prophetic blessings. But even as we remember that Jesus came to live, we need to also remember that Jesus came to die. As we think about his birth we do…
With a new year dawning, many Christian families will resolve to approach family devotions with greater faithfulness in the year ahead, or perhaps even to begin family devotions for the first time. These are great resolutions! Here are 10 ideas and 10 tips that may help. Ten Ideas for Family Devotions Read the Narratives. Read…
Temptation is a mysterious thing. There must be method to the madness, there must be patterns of how and when we are tempted by specific sins. If there are, I’ve never quite been able to hack or solve the system. But at the very least we can observe this: There are some times in life…
For the past couple of weeks my RSS feeder has been humming with list after list of the best books of 2016. It seems that just about every avid reader I follow is eager to share his or her picks for the year that was. I love these lists and decided I’d compile them to…
Christmas is fast approaching and, not surprisingly, my kids are looking forward to seeing what’s under the tree. The girls, at least, are still young enough that they are waiting with bated breath to learn what treasures they’ll be receiving. I love this. I enjoy their anticipation and am excited to experience their joy as…
The Bible often speaks in broad words, in great sweeping statements. We often observe so little nuance in its words, so few exceptions to its commands. As we read the Bible we come across statements like these: In so many cases and in so many ways the Bible speaks in black and white terms. It…
There is no source of comfort as true or as good as God’s book, the Bible. For millennia, God’s people have turned to its pages to find solace, to find hope and encouragement. Sometimes comfort is found in unexpected places, in unlikely words. I found it this morning in a simple sentence written by Jesus’s…
The gospel has a kind of logic to it. According to Sinclair Ferguson, it always holds to one important rule: Divine indicatives (statements about what God has done, is doing, or will do) logically precede and ground divine imperatives (statements about what we are to do in response). Any actions God requires us to take…
From “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” to 1800 AD. That’s how long it took for earth to reach a population of 1 billion people. The next billion took just 130 years, the one after that 30 years, then 15, then 13. By the new millennium, earth’s population had reached 6…
We cannot understand human history apart from its conflicts, its revolts, its revolutions. This is true of world history, political history, social history, religious history, and undoubtedly any other kind of history. For good or for ill—and humanity’s long past has many examples of both—, we humans are revolutionaries, always primed for a conflict. But…
One of the pleasures of diverse reading is finding unexpected connections between unrelated books. I found one of these recently as I was reading Shoe Dog by Phil Knight (a book about the founding and growth of Nike) and Devoted to God by Sinclair Ferguson (a book about the Christian’s growth in holiness)—two books I…
Today is my fortieth birthday. A few days ago Aileen asked if she could have access to my site and share something she wrote for the occasion (as well as choose the photo to accompany it). To be honest, I feel a bit awkward about it all, but who am I to refuse her? This…
Should children obey their parents? Or, perhaps more to the point, should parents insist upon their children’s obedience? The culture around us seems perplexed, so focused on personal autonomy that in many families it seems clear that the children rule the roost. Many parents doubt their ability to direct their children and may even doubt…
While there are many places you can go today to find deals on electronics and other big-ticket items, I like to provide a place for Christian retailers to make their deals known to Christians who are trying to kick-start their Christmas shopping. I will update this list regularly throughout the weekend, so check back often.…
It is a bold claim we Christians make, a claim that puts us at odds with the great majority of people on this earth. Our claim is that, by the grace of God, we’ve got it right and they’ve got it wrong, that we know the way to be made right with God and they…
We were made to mimic. God made us in such a way that we learn many of life’s skills by way of imitation. For good or for ill we also learn character, or lack of character, by imitation. Parents who routinely blow up in anger cannot be surprised when they raise a brood of children…