Category: Uncategorized

Lovingkindness / Steadfast Love

Reading the Psalms, I noticed over and over the phrase steadfast love (NRSV) that kept jumping off the page. It seems like the psalmist really liked to use this word (ches-ed) as it shows up over 120 times in the Psalms. Something about the word keeps drawing me into...

Life is Not a Test

“Our life here is not a test of our resolve to see if we will do the right things, but an invitation to become part of what God wants to restore” (Forming: A Work of Grace, p.50). Most of my early Christian life was characterized by my efforts to...

Losing Your Life

“When you voluntarily give yourself away, you will be left with nothing to lose. When you have nothing to lose, you will have nothing to hide.” — James B. Smith, Room of Marvels...

1 John 3

See how great a love the Father has shown — that we should be called children of God! And not just in name only. We really are His children! And we do not quite know what it will look like when we are all grown up. But we do...

Vision

“Anytime somebody does something great for God, it always begins with a vision. But the vision isn’t of what I’m going to do. It’s not of what we’re going to do. The vision is a vision of God and how good God is and how fortunate I am to...

The Trinity

“The advantage of believing in the Trinity is not that we get an A from God for knowing the right answer. The advantage of believing in the Trinity is that we then live as if the Trinity is real, as if the cosmos around us is actually beyond all...

Surrender

We are often encouraged to surrender our life to God. And that is good, because only in surrender to God do we find life. However, as with nearly everything about the spiritual life, there are ways we can miss or misunderstand what God means by something like surrender. First...

Urgency

Almost every day we hear news that makes us wonder how long the world can last. And with very little effort we can find doomsday prophets who will predict with certainty that the end is near. Not that long ago we all went through the Y2K hysteria. A few...

Forgive and Remember

I just want to pass along a great article by Curt Thompson entitled, “Forgive and Remember.” What a great alternative to “Forgive and Forget” (which we cannot really do anyway)....

What Would Rembrandt Do?

Imagine that you are given a set of watercolors and canvas from Kmart and asked to paint a picture. Would your first thoughts really be, “Now let’s see … What Would Rembrandt Do?” And why not? Well for me, my first reason is that I’m not Rembrandt. I can’t...