But are we any happier as a society? Have the new-found freedoms brought personal peace? Based on the angry rhetoric from those who most loudly proclaim freedom from limits, I struggle to see that we are indeed happier.

Honesty demands that we admit our struggles to work out our faith. Real faith is at times a gritty mess and we all face difficult times. My experience is that God remains faithful even when we are faithless, as Paul tells us in 2 Timothy 2:13. Feeling doubt and even expressing doubt does not automatically disqualify someone from being relationship with God.

I have recently begun to understand that there have been times in my life when I pretended that I was displaying grace, but it was not grace. It was cowardice masquerading as grace. There are times when the lone, contrary voice needed to be heard and mine was silent. There are times when it would […]

I get weary of the call to be woke because in the end, it doesn’t matter how woke we are. It doesn’t matter whether we are liked and accepted by the social warriors of the day. It only matters if we fulfill our mission to make disciples.

I don’t think that we can place too much stress on Jesus’ statement about the responsibility for building the church. It is his; he claimed the responsibility and the resurrection proved that he has the power to do it. Maybe we should spending more time in prayer asking him how he wants us to participate in that building than we do in building our own strategies.

I heard a speaker recently talk about ministry as a fusion of calling and gifting. Both the call and the gifting are given by God to those he chooses to minister to his church. And both the calling and the gifting must be operational for ministry to be effective.

It has been my observation that the amount of control that a person attempts to exert over their environment is directly proportional to their level of insecurity. Insecure people feel a need to control their environment and those around them.

Jesus warned us that there would be people in our churches with improper motives for being there. The parable of the wheat and tares is one place where Jesus makes this distinction.