Joshua is in the valley below, fighting Amalek hand to hand. He has the men Moses told him to choose, and they are fighting with whatever they have. Their swords. Their staffs. Their bare hands. The fight is the kind that does not end clean. Dust in the eyes. Blood on the wrists. A man… Continue reading

Two men are crawling up a cliff. Not an army. Not a regiment. Not a company of soldiers with a coordinated assault plan. Two. One of them is the king’s son. The other one is the boy who carries his weapons. They are using their hands and their feet, the loose rocks scraping their palms,… Continue reading

The field outside the city of Rabbah smelled like dust and blood and horses. The Ammonites had come out of the gates and lined up in front of the city walls, ready for the fight Joab had come for. That was the battle Joab had planned. Two armies, face to face, the kind of fight… Continue reading

English has lost something the New Testament still has. We used to have “thou” and “ye.” Singular and plural. The English Bible carried the distinction for centuries. Then the language shifted, and we flattened both words into the same one, and we have been losing meaning ever since. You. One word, two meanings, and no… Continue reading

If you stripped a Roman legionary down to the metal and laid his kit on the ground, you would be looking at a piece of engineering older than most religions. Leather belt with iron plates. Cuirass forged to the shape of a man’s chest. Studded sandals built for marching and holding ground. Long rectangular shield.… Continue reading

There is a season in some lives when everything goes at the same time. Continue reading

Loneliness is the one pressure that nobody warns you about in church. Continue reading

There is one kind of pressure that is worse than all the others, because there is no one outside to blame. Continue reading

Grief is what love does when it cannot find its object anymore. Continue reading

You know the feeling. You finally lay down. The lights are off. The house is settled. And your mind opens for business. Continue reading

There is a particular kind of tired the world does not know what to do with. Continue reading

Most of us learned to handle fear the way we learned to handle a wasp on the back porch. Stay still. Don’t breathe. Hope it leaves on its own. Continue reading

The genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1 is the gospel before the gospel. Every name on the list is doing work, and most of us have been skipping it for years. Continue reading

Philippians 2:25-30 — “Yet I considered it necessary to send to you Epaphroditus, my brother, fellow worker, and fellow soldier, but your messenger and the one who ministered to my need… because for the work of Christ he came close to death, not regarding his life, to supply what was lacking in your service toward… Continue reading

Philemon 10-11 — “I appeal to you for my son Onesimus, whom I have begotten while in my chains, who once was unprofitable to you, but now is profitable to you and to me.” His name was Onesimus. Onesimos (Ὀνήσιμος), Strong’s G3682. It is a Greek word that means useful, profitable, beneficial. In the first… Continue reading

1 Kings 17:12 — “So she said, ‘As the LORD your God lives, I do not have bread, only a handful of flour in a bin, and a little oil in a jar. And see, I am gathering a couple of sticks that I may go in and prepare it for myself and my son,… Continue reading

2 Kings 5:2-3 — “And the Syrians had gone out on raids, and had brought back captive a young girl from the land of Israel. She waited on Naaman’s wife. Then she said to her mistress, ‘If only my master were with the prophet who is in Samaria! For he would heal him of his… Continue reading

Judges 3:31 — “After him was Shamgar the son of Anath, who killed six hundred men of the Philistines with an ox goad; and he also delivered Israel.” That’s it. That’s the whole biography. Thirty-two words in our English Bible, twenty-something in the Hebrew. No childhood. No call narrative. No tribe of origin. No wife,… Continue reading

We have spent twelve posts looking at what is already true of you in Christ. Already chosen. Already adopted. Already justified. Already sealed. Already indwelt. Already raised together with Him. Already seated in heavenly places. Already a hyper-conqueror in tribulation, distress, peril, and sword. But the Bible never lets the believer rest only in the… Continue reading

There are two ways a Christian can approach the spiritual disciplines, and one of them will eventually break him. The first way is to treat them as currency. Prayer, Scripture reading, fasting, silence, communion, all of them turned into deposits the believer is making in some heavenly account, hoping to accumulate enough that God will… Continue reading

I have been a believer long enough to watch the American church slowly forget something the first century took for granted. The first Christians did not have a category for the solitary believer. They did not have a category for me and Jesus. They had Christ and His body. The two were so tightly bound… Continue reading

This is the post in this series I almost did not want to write, because I do not want to do it badly. There are people reading this whose lives do not look or feel anything like the bright, smiling Christian poster from the first post in this series. People who have lost a child.… Continue reading

There are two ways to come to God after you have sinned, and only one of them works. The first way is to come the way a hired man comes after a mistake. Hat in hand. Eyes down. Bracing for the firing. The internal posture is I have to make this right or I am… Continue reading

There is a pattern in the Bible that, once you see it, you cannot unsee. The serpent’s first sentence in Genesis 3 and the devil’s first sentence in Matthew 4 are the same kind of sentence. Different words on the surface. Same move underneath. In Genesis 3:1 the serpent says, Has God indeed said, You… Continue reading

I have watched a lot of Christians try to win wars on the wrong terrain. A man wants to stop a habit, so he focuses on the habit. He sets up alarms, blocks websites, builds accountability, throws away the bottle. Some of that is wise. None of it goes deep enough. Within six months, the… Continue reading

Most believers I know have a doctrine of the Holy Spirit they would not be embarrassed by on a doctrinal exam, and a working life that looks like He is not in the building. We say we believe He indwells us. We sing about Him on Sunday. We mention Him in our prayers. And then… Continue reading

There are two ditches a believer can fall into when he tries to think about his own holiness. The first ditch is despair. He looks at the gap between who he is in Christ and who he is on a Tuesday afternoon, and he cannot reconcile it. He concludes that either the gospel is not… Continue reading

There is a difference between a hired man and a son. The hired man works for what he gets. He earns his place at the table. He is welcome as long as he produces. The day he stops producing, the day he gets sick, the day he makes a mistake big enough, the relationship is… Continue reading

There are people sitting in pews this Sunday who think they are still the person they used to be. They believe Christ has forgiven them. They believe they are going to heaven when they die. But somewhere in the back of the head, the old self is still treated like the real self. The new… Continue reading

If you read Paul’s letters with a pencil in your hand, you start noticing something. He cannot stop saying it.In Christ. In Him. In Christ Jesus. In whom. In the Lord.Some scholars have counted around 165 occurrences of this phrase or a close variant in Paul’s writings. That is more than once per chapter, on… Continue reading

There is a picture most of us carry in our heads when we hear the phrase victorious Christian life. The believer in the picture is smiling. He has not lost his temper in months. Her marriage is steady, her kids are obedient, her Bible is highlighted in three colors. Sin has been crushed under heel.… Continue reading

The Authority of the Believer, Part 7 Here is where the series has been heading the whole time, and I want to write it carefully, because a lot of you have been waiting for this post whether you knew it or not. You did everything right. You learned the truth about the authority of the… Continue reading

The Authority of the Believer, Part 6 Most of us are not fighting demons this morning. We are trying to figure out how to pay a bill that came in bigger than we expected. We are praying over a child whose cough has turned into something the doctor does not love. We are thinking about… Continue reading

The Authority of the Believer, Part 5 If you came up in the American church anytime between 1980 and the early 2000s, you have probably been through some version of spiritual warfare teaching that left you with questions. Maybe you were in a prayer room where somebody yelled at the devil for twenty minutes straight.… Continue reading

The Authority of the Believer, Part 4 A woman pulls you aside after service. Her mother is in the hospital. Stage four. The family is scared. She wants to know if you will pray. Here is the honest question most believers have never been taught how to answer. Do you ask God to heal her,… Continue reading

The Authority of the Believer, Part 3 So Jesus has all authority in heaven and on earth. Good. Great, even. But what does that have to do with me on a Tuesday morning, trying to pay the power bill and praying over a kid who cannot sleep? This is where a lot of otherwise solid… Continue reading

The Authority of the Believer, Part 2 We ended the last post with a mess. God still owned the earth. The legal deed had never left His hand. But the operational authority He had entrusted to Adam had been handed over to an enemy, and every generation since Eden had inherited the consequences. The garden… Continue reading

The Authority of the Believer, Part 1 There are two conversations happening in the church right now about authority, and they are both confused. The first conversation says God is fully sovereign, end of story. Nothing happens on this planet that He does not directly cause or permit. Prayer is mostly a tool to align… Continue reading

James 1:5 (NKJV) “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him.” “The beginning of wisdom is the discovery of our own ignorance.” — William Temple James does not begin his letter gently. The opening verses drop the… Continue reading

Psalm 23:1 (NKJV) “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.” “The LORD is my shepherd — not was, not will be, not might be. He is. Right now, in this moment, He is.” — F.B. Meyer Six words in Hebrew. Seven in English. And in those seven words, David collapses the entire theology… Continue reading

Matthew 7:7–8 (NKJV) “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.” “Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance; it is laying hold of His… Continue reading

Most conversations about sanctification start in the wrong place. They start with behavior. Stop doing this. Start doing that. Try harder. Pray more. Read your Bible with more consistency. White-knuckle your way toward holiness and hope God is impressed by the effort. And look, none of those things are bad. Prayer matters. Scripture matters. Discipline… Continue reading

Philippians 4:19 (NKJV) “And my God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.” “God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s supply.” — Hudson Taylor Two words in this verse deserve to be read slowly before anything else is said about them. My God. Not “God… Continue reading