To what can I compare this generation? They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others: “We played the pipe for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.” For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He has a demon.” The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of…
So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah. “Quick,” he said, “get three seahs of the finest flour and knead it and bake some bread. Then he ran to the herd and selected a choice, tender calf and gave it to a servant, who hurried to prepare it. He then brought some curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared, and set these before them. While they ate, he stood near them under a…
Silence has been an important spiritual discipline since the birth of the church. It may be more important now than ever before, for two reasons—both related (unsurprisingly) to the challenges of living in a digital age. First, the discipline of silence is so important because a digital age is also a distracted age. We carry little devices around with us that quite literally clamor for our attention. Needless to say, this will drastically inhibit our ability to…
Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but whoever hates correction is stupid. . . . The way of fools seems right to them, but the wise listen to advice. (Proverbs 12:1, 15) If these proverbs are true (as they are, of course), then we are living in an increasingly stupid culture. (I apologize for the bluntness of the language, but I am simply quoting God’s Word here. Those of you with small children in the home likely…
I wrote about evangelism in my last post, and I want to continue the discussion today. At this point in history, living as we do in a post-Christian culture, we must understand that we enter into most evangelistic conversations with a deficit. Certainly most people will not have a positive view of Christianity (and even less so of Christians), but fewer and fewer will even have a neutral view. We are starting in a hole, I…
For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them. 20 To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. 21 To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. 22 To the weak I became…
In many ways, the prevailing (and dramatic) shifts in western culture during the past few centuries all center on a single issue: truth—and how we learn it (if we can). To Christians, who worship the One who claimed to be Truth (John 14:6), these cultural shifts prove exceedingly relevant. If we are not mindful of our culture’s changing views of truth, we will imbibe the spirit of the age unwittingly. This is especially evident in…
As regular and predictable as the rotation of heavenly bodies is astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s New Year’s Day tweet. A few words may change, but for the past several years on January 1 he has expressed some sentiment like this year’s offering: “Not that anybody’s asked, but New Years [sic] Day on the Gregorian Calendar is a cosmically arbitrary event, carrying no Astronomical significance at all.” Equally inevitable is the frustration voiced by many…
When tragedy strikes, as it did in Las Vegas this week, people begin to ask questions. It is part of human nature: we reason, consider, speculate, and ultimately seek to find answers that will provide meaning or comfort. Why did this happen?  Where was God?  Couldn’t we have prevented this?  These are important questions, but they are not necessarily the questions to which Scripture gives answers. That is, if we look to…
As a wee lad in high school, I remember being struck by one particular quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five: “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.” The she to which Vonnegut refers is Billy Pilgrim’s mother, and the thing that she purchased in the gift shop to give her life meaning was a crucifix, which hung above Billy’s bed as…