Victoria Osteen and Our Conservative Prosperity Gospel

Last night, Christian Twitter was alive with the ridiculous and sad clip of Victoria Osteen’s blatant prosperity gospel declaration. “We go to church, not for God, but for us.” I especially liked the enterprising blogger who affixed Bill Cosby’s “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard” to the end of the clip. Well done. But […]

The God (little “g”) in Your Pocket

I was talking to my mother last week about the readily available technology we have in our smart phones. She was telling me, half-joking, “I can always Google something. So if I’m in a conversation and I don’t know what they are talking about, I can quietly Google it and sound smart.” We laughed, because […]

5 People We Should Pray For Even Though We Don’t Want To

Let’s be honest. There are certain types of people we are conditioned, by our culture, to not like. These are the people that nobody is going to give us credit for liking, the people we tend to distance ourselves from. For good reason. And yet, these are the sinners Christ most likely would have sought […]

The Rhythm of Forgiveness and Repentance

This past Sunday, in our sermon series Teach us to Pray, we looked at this phrase in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Now this phrase of this prayer would be really wonderful if it stopped at “Forgive us our debts.” That’s how most of us pray, if we’re […]

Prayer That Starts With God

On Sunday I started a brand-new series on the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13) entitled, “Teach Us to Pray.” Let’s remember that this is not a prayer Jesus prays, but that a prayer He offers for his disciples to pray. One of the things that really strikes me about Jesus’ model prayer is just how God-centered this […]

The Sin About Which No One Will Speak

Envy is like a fly that passes all the body’s sounder parts, and dwells upon the sores. – Arthur Chapman  There is a sin that nobody in our world really wants to discuss. It’s the fashionable sin, that fuels our great social movements and has become an engine of our politics. It’s the sin of […]

Parents and Facebook

I recently posted a guest-blog for Covenant Eyes on the role of parents in establishing Facebook parameters for their kids: According to a recent survey, 75% of teens have a Facebook profile, 54% check their status once a day, and 65% of them access Facebook through their mobile devices. Teens are living, increasingly, in a […]

God’s Favor Versus God’s Love

I think the current “gospel-centered” movement is one of the best things to happen to the church in a long time. The push for more expository preaching that grounds every imperative in the indicatives of the gospel–this is important. For too long the Church has preached a gospel of moralism, of legalism, of do-it-yourself lite […]

Why Christians Are Not the Point of Easter

I’m studying for my Easter sermon. I have to be honest, sometimes I get intimidated by Easter sermons. It’s not that I don’t enjoy preaching about the pivot point of our faith: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s just that I know on Easter there are those people sitting and listening to my message that […]

More Grace Is What We Need :: New Hope Digital

I wrote a guest-post for the New Hope Digital blog on my life verse. Here’s a key quote: We think that if we come, like Cain, with our best works, that God will favor us. But pride—boasting of the goodness in us—invites the resistance of the Almighty. Instead, the way to God lies in humility. […]

Talking to Yourself in a Trial

In trials, you cannot directly control your emotions, but you can change them indirectly by leading your mind toward the right biblical considerations. Thinking about trials God’s way generates the proper inner and outer responses. As you begin to see trials more and more from God’s viewpoint, eventually you will read the place where you […]

Lessons from the Juniper Tree

If Hollywood commissioned a biopic of the Old Testament hero, Elijah, they would probably end the movie with his epic holy war on Mt. Carmel. It would be a fitting ending for such a bold, courageous, insurgent leader. But alas, this is not how Elijah’s story ends at all. If you turn the page one […]