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Turning Over the Tables

He saved his hardest words for the most religious men in the room. A study of the temple cleansing, the word hypokrites, and the rut of just looking alive. Continue reading
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The Wrong People Get In

Jesus kept handing the front-row seat to the outsider. A study of the Good Samaritan, the word neighbor, and the lines the church draws without ever voting on them. Continue reading
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Bad Company

Table fellowship declared who was in, and Jesus kept eating with the wrong people. A look at the open table, the word hamartolos, and the lists churches quietly keep. Continue reading
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Breaking the Sabbath on Purpose

He could have waited for sundown. Instead he called the man to the front and healed him in full view. Why Jesus broke the Sabbath on purpose, and what it says to us. Continue reading
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Who Do You Think You Are?

Before Jesus healed the paralyzed man’s legs, he forgave his sins, and the scribes cried blasphemy. They were right that only God can do it. That was exactly the claim. Continue reading
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The Man Who Touched Lepers

Jesus stretched out his hand and touched what the Law said would defile him. Instead, cleanness flowed the other way, and it says everything to a church that keeps its distance. Continue reading
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This Church Needs a Scandal

The people who knew Scripture best looked at Jesus and saw a heretic. A new series walks through the scandalous things he did and holds each one up as a mirror to the church. Continue reading
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Can I Trust the Bible? (Part 7) — Can I Trust It With My Life?

We have come a long way. Behind us now are the questions of where the book came from, whether it was copied faithfully, the contradictions, the passages that trouble you, and whether the central events actually happened. If you have followed all six, you have real answers now, better answers than the doubt had led… Continue reading
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Can I Trust the Bible? (Part 6) — Did It Really Happen?

So far we have asked where the book came from, whether it survived the copying, and how to read its hard seams. But under all of it sits a simpler, heavier question, and it is the one that keeps a believer awake more than any other. Is any of it real? Did these things actually… Continue reading
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Can I Trust the Bible? (Part 5) — What About the Parts That Trouble Me?

This is the post I almost did not want to write, because it is the one that gets closest to the bone. The other questions are things you could debate at arm’s length. This one is different. This is the passage you read in your quiet time and then sat there, unsettled, and closed the… Continue reading
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Can I Trust the Bible? (Part 4) — What About the Contradictions?

Sooner or later someone hands you a list. A tidy column of Bible verses that supposedly cannot both be true, printed up to prove the whole thing collapses under its own weight. Maybe you have seen one. Maybe you have made a quiet list of your own, verses you noticed did not seem to line… Continue reading
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Can I Trust the Bible? (Part 3) — Hasn’t It Been Copied and Changed a Thousand Times?

Everybody has played the game. You sit in a circle, somebody whispers a sentence, and by the time it goes around the room “the cat sat on the mat” has become something about a hat and a bad first date. We laugh because we all know the truth it points to. Copy a thing enough… Continue reading
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Can I Trust the Bible? (Part 2) — Where Did This Book Even Come From?

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up a picture of how the Bible came together, and the picture is a room. A room full of powerful men in robes, four hundred years after Jesus, arguing over which books to keep and which to burn. Somebody bangs a gavel. Politics wins. The winners… Continue reading
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Can I Trust the Bible? (Part 1) — You’re Allowed to Ask This

A seven-part series for anyone who believes and still lies awake wondering. A note before we start This series is not written to win an argument. It is written for the person in the pew. Maybe that is you. You showed up Sunday. You sang the songs. You would tell anyone who asked that you… Continue reading
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So How Is It For You?

Part 7 of the series “Written For You, Not To You,” on the proper way to read the Bible. We have spent six posts taking things away from you. You are not the hero. It is not your mail. That is not your promise. If that were the whole series, I would have done you… Continue reading
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That Promise Had an Address, and It Wasn’t Yours

Part 6 of the series “Written For You, Not To You,” on the proper way to read the Bible. I promised you back in the first post that I would give Jeremiah 29:11 back to you. It is time. But to give it back the right way, I first have to take it apart, because… Continue reading
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Did God Command That, or Just Record It?

Part 5 of the series “Written For You, Not To You,” on the proper way to read the Bible. A man once told me, with total sincerity, that he made big decisions the way Gideon did. He would lay out a “fleece.” God, if you want me to take this job, let it rain tomorrow.… Continue reading
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Read It the Way It Was Written

Part 4 of the series “Written For You, Not To You,” on the proper way to read the Bible. You already know how to do this. You do it every day without thinking. When you read the weather report, you take it flat. Rain Thursday means rain Thursday. When you read a love note, you… Continue reading
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You’re Reading Somebody Else’s Mail

Part 3 of the series “Written For You, Not To You,” on the proper way to read the Bible. Imagine you found a letter in an old shoebox at an estate sale. No envelope, no date, the top corner torn off. It opens in the middle of a fight. “You have to stop letting your… Continue reading
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You Are Not the Hero of This Story

Part 2 of the series “Written For You, Not To You,” on the proper way to read the Bible. Every Sunday school flannelgraph got this wrong, and I say that with love, because I grew up on those flannelgraphs. A small shepherd boy stands in a dry valley. A giant roars across the way. The… Continue reading
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Not Written To You, But Written For You

Part 1 of the series “Written For You, Not To You,” on the proper way to read the Bible. There is a verse cross-stitched on pillows and printed on coffee mugs and quoted at graduations every spring. “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not… Continue reading
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Take Back the Imagination: Why Christians Should Write Fiction and Make Art

There is a strange quiet in most churches when the subject of art comes up. A man will stand and give a testimony about his work in construction, and everyone nods. A woman will talk about teaching third graders, and the room warms. But let someone say they write novels, or paint, or make films,… Continue reading
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One Table

Jesus prayed for one thing the night before He died. Not that we would agree on everything. That we would be one. The final post in the Jesus Only series. Continue reading
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The Spirit Fence

Pentecostals have sometimes taught that without a certain experience you have only half the Gospel. Others have taught that hunger for more is a counterfeit. Both fences wound. The Spirit is given to everyone who believes, and He distributes as He wills. Continue reading
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The Predestination Fence

Presbyterians and Baptists have divided over election for centuries. It is a real and serious question. It is not a salvation question. You can be wrong about the mechanics of how God saves and still be saved by the God who does it. Continue reading
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The Gatekeepers

Jesus opened the door. Somewhere in the two thousand years since, His people appointed themselves bouncers at a door He already flung open. A look at gatekeeping and the things Paul called disputable. Continue reading
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Jesus Paid It All

The cross was not a down payment. It was payment in full. Every attempt to add works to grace is an attempt to pay a debt that has already been cleared. Continue reading
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Jesus Only

Salvation is Jesus and nothing else. Not Jesus plus your effort, your record, or your certainty. The jailer at Philippi asked the only question that matters, and Paul’s answer had no footnotes. Continue reading
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Tetelestai: The One Word That Changes Everything About the Cross

From the cross, Jesus said one word in Greek that was stamped on first-century receipts and on courtroom sentences. Tetelestai. Paid in full. Sentence served. Continue reading
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The Week That Was Written in Advance: Reading the Passion Through the Prophets

The last week of Jesus’ life is dense with layered meaning. The prophets had scripted much of it centuries before. The men carrying it out had no idea they were reading the lines. Continue reading
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The Widow’s Two Mites and the Loudest Silence in the Temple

The temple treasury was loud. Rich men poured coins down trumpet-shaped receptacles you could hear across the courts. The widow’s two mites barely made a sound. Continue reading
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What Was in Their Hands: How Everyday Objects Carry the Weight of Jesus’ Teaching

Jesus reached for what every hand in the crowd had held that morning. A coin, a seed, a wineskin, a needle. The ordinary object carried the weight. Continue reading
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Why the Father Ran: The Cultural Shock of the Prodigal Son’s Welcome

A dignified Middle Eastern patriarch did not run. When the father in Luke 15 ran to meet the prodigal, he was doing something the original hearers gasped at. Continue reading
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The First-Century Body Knew Things We Don’t: Customs and Gestures in the Gospels

Every culture teaches its body things. The first-century body knew an enormous number of things the modern body has never been taught. Recovering the gestures recovers the Gospels. Continue reading
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What ‘Born Again’ Really Means in the Greek (and Why Nicodemus Missed It)

The Greek word behind ‘born again’ carries two meanings at once: again and from above. Nicodemus heard the lower one. Most modern readers do too. Continue reading
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When the Word Itself Is the Sermon: The Greek and Hebrew Under the Gospels

Some sayings of Jesus turn on a single word that carries two senses at once, an idiom the English flattens, or a pun in Aramaic. The original language is doing the work. Continue reading
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What ‘Living Water’ Meant at the Feast of Tabernacles

When Jesus offered living water in John 7, he stood up in the middle of a temple ceremony that had been begging for the Spirit. The calendar makes the saying land like a thunderclap. Continue reading
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The Calendar Was a Teacher: How Jewish Feasts Shape the Sayings of Jesus

Jesus timed some of his most explosive sentences to specific moments in the Jewish festival calendar. The feast was the setup. The sentence was the punchline. Continue reading
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Why Did Jesus Choose Caesarea Philippi? The ‘Gates of Hades’ Saying Decoded

When Jesus said the gates of hell would not prevail against his church, he was standing in front of a cliff the locals called the gate to the underworld. The location was the sermon. Continue reading
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When the Place Was the Sermon: Recovering the Geography of Jesus’ Teaching

Jesus did not teach in a vacuum. He preached on located ground, and the location was often half the sermon. Here is what we miss when we read past the geography. Continue reading
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Who Has Your Back?

The lion does not chase the flock. He does not roar into the middle of the herd and try to take down a strong ram in the open. That is not how lions hunt. He moves along the edges. He watches. He waits for the one that wanders. A young ewe lagging behind. An old… Continue reading
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Two by Two

When Jesus sent the disciples out, He sent them in pairs. Mark records it plain. “And He called the twelve to Himself, and began to send them out two by two, and gave them power over unclean spirits” (Mark 6:7 NKJV). Luke records the same pattern with a different group, the seventy others Jesus appointed.… Continue reading
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The Hands Held Steady

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
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Nothing Restrains the Lord

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
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The Back-to-Back Battle

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
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Stand Therefore (And Notice the Plural)

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
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The Gap in the Armor

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
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When Faith Has to Hold, Part 7: When Everything Is Falling Apart at Once

There is a season in some lives when everything goes at the same time. Continue reading
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When Faith Has to Hold, Part 6: When No One Is There

Loneliness is the one pressure that nobody warns you about in church. Continue reading
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When Faith Has to Hold, Part 5: When You’re the One Who Failed

There is one kind of pressure that is worse than all the others, because there is no one outside to blame. Continue reading
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The Believer’s Creed
I believe in the eternal God—
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—
One in essence, infinite in glory,
the Maker of heaven and earth,
whose wisdom shaped all things seen and unseen.
I believe in Jesus Christ,
the only begotten Son of God,
conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
holy and humble, yet Lord of all.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
He descended into the depths of hell,
and on the third day He rose victorious.
He ascended into heaven,
and now reigns at the right hand of the Father,
from where He will come again
to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the breath and power of God within us,
who gives life, convicts hearts, and sustains faith.
Through the Spirit, the Church is made holy,
a communion of saints across all generations.
I believe in the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting in the presence of God.
I believe in the sacred mystery of the Trinity—
not three gods, but one holy unity:
Father, Son, and Spirit—eternal, unchanging, divine.
I believe in the sacred story revealed in Scripture:
that from the beginning, light has warred against darkness,
and though the enemy rose in pride,
God’s promise prevailed through the Seed—
Christ Jesus, born of a woman,
who triumphed through His cross and empty tomb.
I believe salvation is a gift of grace—
received by faith, sealed by repentance,
and made real through the transforming love of God.
I believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God,
a lamp for our path and truth for every soul.
I believe in the call of baptism—
a burial of the old, a rising to new life in Christ.
I believe the Holy Spirit empowers believers
with gifts of healing, wisdom, and tongues,
that we may glorify God and serve the world in love.
I believe in divine healing,
for the power that raised Christ from the grave
still moves with mercy among His people.
The Believer’s Charge
We believe that we are called and anointed—
not as spectators, but as servants of the living God.
We are His witnesses in all the earth,
ambassadors of reconciliation and bearers of His light.
We believe that Christ has commissioned us
to go into the world and proclaim His gospel,
to speak truth to the lost and hope to the broken,
to open blind eyes and set captives free.
In His name we move without fear,
for the Spirit goes before us with power and signs.
We believe the promise of our Lord:
that these signs will follow those who believe—
we shall cast out demons in His name,
speak with new tongues of heavenly fire,
lay hands upon the sick and see them restored,
tread upon the works of the enemy,
and walk in the authority of the risen Christ.
We believe that the Spirit within us
confirms the Word with power and grace—
that we are vessels of His love,
agents of His mercy,
and temples of His presence.
We choose to live as those sent by God,
our hearts aflame with His gospel,
our hands ready to serve,
our voices lifted in praise,
our lives poured out for His glory.
The Blessed Hope
I believe in the glorious return of Jesus Christ,
who will restore all things
and reign in righteousness and peace.
And I believe in eternal life—
the home prepared for the redeemed,
and the solemn truth of judgment for the unrepentant.
This is our faith, our confession, our calling, and our hope.
To God be the glory—forever and ever.
Amen.


