Emergency!!
I had just arrived home from a business trip and pulled up into the driveway. My wife was waiting in the carport outside, when just as I opened my car door my oldest daughter came running . . . with fear on her face. “Mom! Come quick!” My wife went inside and I just let her go handle it as I grabbed my stuff from the car and headed into the house. I could hear some whimpering from the back of the house, and so I followed the sounds. In the bathroom my wife was pressing a wet wash cloth on the mouth of my youngest daughter while the oldest just stood there looking pale and worried. Whatever had happened, blood was definitely involved, and the oldest was obviously feeling guilty and responsible. Shaking off the exhaustion from hours of...
F4 The FEARLESS Christian Life
This is the fourth article in a four-part series . . . If you have been paying attention, and if you have read the previous three articles, you have been wondering what all this was building up to, and where it was all going. The only problem with the Fearless Christian life is that I believe so many Christian men wrongly believe they are there. Go back to the Floundering Christian life for a moment, and realize that when you ask God to use you, and God begins to take you into the deeper waters, there is panic. There is unease. There is a complete loss of control. When God intervenes, and we are taken back to the safety of the Favored Christian life, there is a tendency to pat ourselves on the back for having made the effort – never to try again. ...
Psalm 95: 1-7
Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. 2 Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song. 3 For the LORD is the great God, the great King above all gods. 4 In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him. 5 The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. 6 Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker; 7 for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care.
The Fruit of My Spirit is Sour
When I look at the list of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, I shudder a little. Because I don’t have them. It was easier for me to look at Galatians 5 and feel good about myself before I began to see myself through the eyes of my four-year-old daughter. Before, I believe that I thought I had most of the fruit well in hand. I would look at the list and say to myself, “Well, I think most people would say I am kind and loving, gentle, faithful, even joyful.” But my blind spot was spelled out in the first part of that thought: “I think most people would say …” That is how I view my character: through what other people think of me. So it’s instructive now to be subject to the all-day, every-day gaze of a child who...
Church or Crutch?
What should church be to us as Christians? This is a question I ponder often. Here are some of my questions for myself this week. Thoughts? * It’s common today for churches to call for Christians to “break through the walls” of their church buildings. Usually sermons that go this way are aiming at expanding outreach programs, which are (funny) run from inside the church. Is this the solution to an overly church-centric theology? * Even churches that preach that Christianity should be lived in everyday life rather than just within the walls of the church often place remarkable import on church attendance as a litmus test for your spiritual well being. Is this right? * Psalm 32:7: You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you...
There Is No Right Answer
I’m re-reading (for probably the sixth or seventh time) The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, one of my favorite books. In the first few chapters, Kundera introduces the German expression Einmal ist keinmal, meaning basically that what happens once may as well never have happened at all. One of his characters in the book, Tomas, builds a personal philosophy on this expression, believing that his decisions bear no weight, because we only live life one time, and we have no way of knowing what the effects of our decisions will be. Unbearable Lightness is a spiritual book, but it is not concerned with God. It is concerned with why people do what they do and how and why people love. So I’ve been interested to realize as I’ve begun...