“I believe in God, but I just don’t know if I can trust the God of the Bible. How can a good God have Israel wipe out the Canaanites? Or send people to hell?” I was speaking with an acquaintance at the gym when he asked me a question that many people quietly carry: how can a good God also be a God of wrath?
There are many thoughtful defenses to explain how a benevolent God rightly administers divine judgment. Writers like Paul Copan (Is God a Moral Monster: Making Sense of the Old Testament God) help us answer the Canaanite question reminding us that God gave the Canaanites
Every once in a while, a movie surprises you: not just with spectacle or clever twists, but with heart. Project Hail Mary did that for me. Adapted from Andy Weir’s highly acclaimed novel, Project Hail Mary is one of the most enjoyable movies I’ve seen in a long time: funny, imaginative, and genuinely moving. What lingered with me most after the credits rolled wasn’t the wow factor of the production (although all $248 million of its production costs make the movie visually stunning). It was the friendship.
That might sound strange for a movie about saving the world from an extinction-level threat.
What comes after expressive individualism? Trevin Wax says, “More and more people are shaping their sense of self through powerful group affiliations rather than as independent individuals. This isn’t a rejection of expressive individualism so much as its evolution…
The surprising importance of shallow Christian friendships: Danny D’Aquisto with a helpful contrarian perspective,
In 1985, Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. In the original video game you could choose to play one of the two plumbing brothers: Mario or Luigi. Short and red, tall and green: which would you be? In subsequent editions of the game, you could play a number of other characters including Yoshi or Princess Peach as your character. Choosing one’s character perfectly suited our generation, a generation that was told that we could do anything and be anyone.
We live in a world of choice and that now includes much of what we consider identity. From vocation to gender, the options appear nearly endless to the contemporary westerner.
“She’s gaslighting me.”
“He’s a narcissist.”
I regularly hear couples lob these accusations at one another as they sit across from me in my office. We live in a therapeutic culture, where psychologized language has permeated the way we talk about relationships. Categories and lingo once limited to clinical settings have become everyday vocabulary for explaining conflict.
Last year, Samuel James wrote an excellent post titled If You Ask AI for Marriage Advice, It’ll Probably Tell You to Get Divorced. The article is as good as its title suggests. In it, James shares a striking graph that tracks 15 years of relationship advice on Reddit.
What comes after expressive individualism? Trevin Wax says, “More and more people are shaping their sense of self through powerful group affiliations rather than as independent individuals. This isn’t a rejection of expressive individualism so much as its evolution…
The surprising importance of shallow Christian friendships: Danny D’Aquisto with a helpful contrarian perspective,
In 1985, Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. In the original video game you could choose to play one of the two plumbing brothers: Mario or Luigi. Short and red, tall and green: which would you be? In subsequent editions of the game, you could play a number of other characters including Yoshi or Princess Peach as your character. Choosing one’s character perfectly suited our generation, a generation that was told that we could do anything and be anyone.
We live in a world of choice and that now includes much of what we consider identity. From vocation to gender, the options appear nearly endless to the contemporary westerner.
As I headed into a pastors’ lunch one afternoon, an older pastor I admired greeted me with a big smile and asked, “Can we chat afterward?” I wasn’t sure what Glen wanted to ask me. After the lunch concluded, we walked out to the patio together. Glen got right to the point. “Would you be interested in being part of a covenant group I’m forming?” He explained that he was inviting four other pastors to join the group. We would meet once a month and go on two retreats each year.
It was a significant commitment, but the answer was an easy yes.
You might wonder why a king would hesitate to remove false places of worship. Put yourself in his sandals. Tearing down high places meant disrupting cultural norms, challenging family traditions, and risking public backlash. If you were inclined toward people-pleasing, you would avoid touching those altars. You might say to yourself, “I’ll do what’s right before the Lord, but it’s not my responsibility to make them do what’s right.” If you were pragmatic, you might reason, “There are more pressing political and economic issues to address.” But God does not measure leadership by popularity or pragmatism. He measures it by faithfulness.
You see it, don’t you? A co-worker quietly losing their battle with alcoholism. A cousin whose marriage and family are unraveling. A friend struggling under the weight of a debilitating eating disorder. Pain is everywhere. People are hurting all around us.
If we are able to glimpse even a fraction of the world’s pain, can you imagine what Jesus saw? For any one of us, such suffering would be overwhelming. Yet, what was Jesus’ response to a world filled with the “harassed and helpless”?
Recently, while reading through the gospel of Matthew, I returned to the well-worn passage where Jesus tells his disciples,
How to practice gratitude (even when you don’t feel it): O. Alan Noble says, “We like to think of gratitude as an overflowing feeling directed at others—an outpouring of love and warmth. But sometimes warmth doesn’t come. Even still, another’s kindness deserves our gratitude. What are we to do when we don’t feel grateful but know we ought to be?”
Fight burnout with thanksgiving: Ajith Fernando writes this to pastors, but it’s applicable to everyone. “I have come to notice that the most joyful people in my life and ministry are also the most thankful, and joyous people experience freshness as they go about their service. God’s grace is a means of freshness over the long haul.”
My grandma Betty’s house smelled of lilacs and bacon. Her favorite dusting powder and her favorite breakfast food blended to form a smell all her own that permeated her one-bedroom apartment. I’m sure she didn’t realize the unique olfactory experience she greeted her visitors with.
We become nose blind to the smells we are often around. We recently rented a vehicle that smelled of dirty diapers. By the third day, we weren’t sure if the nasty smell had dissipated or we had just grown accustomed to it.
Similarly, we are often blind to how others experience our leadership. Have you ever met someone who thinks they have a gifting they clearly don’t have?
Three years ago an atomic bomb hit the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, with an estimated 14 million members across more than 47,000 churches. An in-depth investigative report demonstrated that the Executive Committee of the SBC was aware of pervasive sexual malfeasance in their ranks over the past fifteen years and refused to act. The Executive Committee swept sexual abuse allegations under the rug, perpetrators were moved from one congregation to another to hide their abuse, and earnest appeals for reform were denied.
Every Sunday at the front entrance of New Life Bible Fellowship on you’ll see my Co-Lead Pastor, Greg Lavine. If you have a child, then you’ll enter through the side gate where I will meet you. Regularly, first time attendees will express surprise after the service, either to myself or another New Lifer, that a pastor greeted them at the gate. Churchgoers often say they’ve never been to a church where a pastor serves as a greeter.
Many perceive greeters to be the bottom rung of ministry: the place you put warm bodies, those who don’t have the ability to teach, play an instrument, or run technical equipment. I disagree. Greeters are the first person a guest connects with.
What do you want for dinner tonight?
What do you want to watch?
What do you want to do this weekend?
Do you ever feel exhausted by making decisions? More than a few times, Angel and I have come home from hard days at work and looked at each other, “Would you please make a decision about what we are going to eat for dinner?” Researchers note that “by the time the average person goes to bed, they’ve made over 35,000 decisions and all of those decisions take time and energy.”
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