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No Little People, No Little Places Denny Hartford, the founder and director of Vital Signs Ministries, and his wife Claire truly live to the glory of King Jesus. I was touched by this story he shared in a ministry update: Denny mentioned Francis Schaeffer’s quote “No little people, no little...

The Spiritual Discipline of Gratitude for the Church: 5 Ways As we reflect on the Thanksgiving season, we find ourselves thankful for many things – our families, homes, and vocations, to just name a few. Recently, I blogged about the role of gratitude in our work, worship, and the spaces where...

A Pernicious Loop [ 1 min read ★ ] . . . he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything—Acts 17:25 There are few more powerful (and potentially harmful) forces at work in the lives of men than the When/Then lie. It goes like this: when we get that job, that...

Obedient Leadership In The Face Of Laws To Kill Babies The Enemy is great at paralyzing our faith through fear. We stare at the opposition long enough and we lose our courage to do what God has called us to do. Elijah, the prophet of God, stood against the enemies of God and stood for the Lord...

Happy Are the Pure in Heart, for They Shall See God A reader sent me this message related to my book The Purity Principle: This man discovered that when his thirst for joy is satisfied by Christ, sin becomes unattractive. This allows us to say no to the passing pleasures of immorality, not...

A Thanksgiving Memory from Grandma Memory Lane: When I was a child, we always had cats. They all lived outdoors, and some of them were pretty rough. My grandmother always fussed at them and called them some rather *inappropriate* names. As for the cats, they adored her! Then would come...

8 Ways to Bond With Your Stepchild Most of the stepparents who contact me for support tell me they had no idea what they were getting into. One stepdad, Steve, put it this way, “I was never a father before, and at the ripe “young” age of 42, I was thinking that I was somehow going to “get by”...

You’re Magnetic [ 1 min read ★ ] Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?—Mark 2:16 God loves us—just as we are, right now. Wow. That’s kind of difficult to accept, isn’t it? I mean, it’s hard to feel worthy of that love, with all our mistakes, our imperfections. Don’t...

Tis The Season For Giving Thanks Always And For All Things Give Thanks Always And For Everything Always give thanks to God the Father for everything. Ephesians 5: 20 Like a fire that begins with a slow simmering burn before bursting into larger flames, so can we start with an ember of...

Another Perspective on Work In the last twenty-five years, in my work with businessmen, one cannot help but notice how men get their identities in life based on their work and how well they perform in their work. I think this is also true of women. Recently I read about the great jazz...

Where Does Happiness Originate? Some people suppose happiness is uniquely human, unrelated to God’s nature: as He gave us a body and hunger, which He doesn’t have, He gave us a capacity for happiness, which He also doesn’t have. I believe something radically different—that God wants us happy...

Paul’s Rebuke: Divisions and the Lord’s Supper in Corinth The Corinthian Problem: Divisions Between Two Classes Seeking to allay a specific & un-Christlike practice in the Corinthian church when writing from Ephesus on his 3rd Missionary Journey, Paul pinpoints the overarching problem by...

3 Things Every Husband Needs to Hear (A Lot) What does your husband need from you? Shaunti Feldhahn, a bestselling author and social researcher, wrote a book detailing things men wish women knew. It’s called For Women Only: What You Need to Know About the Inner Lives of Men. In it, she...

How Do You Know If Your Relationship is Healthy? Dear Terry, I’m engaged and considering getting married in a few months to a man who I’ve been dating for about a year. A few of my friends have questions about Todd because he sometimes lets me down and doesn’t follow through on all of his...

Short Story: Only Sunshine? It’s raining again, Tommy the tomato plant complained to himself. Why does it always have to rain? I wish we could always have sunshine. Being just a tomato plant, Tommy didn’t know that the rain is exactly what gave him the water he needed to grow strong and...

How Does Evil Differ from Suffering? It’s bad enough to do evil and abstain from good. But God condemns the moral sleight of hand by which we confuse good and evil: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and...

Peacemaking in a Polarized World In this article, we think about how to resist what scientists are calling “polarized information ecosystems.” Polarization is widely discussed. But widely discussed subjects are rarely well-discussed. Too many commentators continue to utilize the increasingly...

Trump’s Angry Rhetoric vs. Christian Values: It’s not Normal Trump’s communication style has been normalized by the way American Evangelicals wholeheartedly endorse him. This is reinforcing the idea of many outside the Church that Christians are defined by their hate for those who are...

Why Does Hosea Warn That God’s People ‘Perish For Lack of Knowledge’? Traditionally dated to somewhere in the 8th century BCE, the Book of Hosea is a book filled with warnings to God’s people; warnings given because of their consistent “unfaithfulness” to their deity and His revealed Law...

Out of Touch with Reality I recently taught a message on wisdom as found in the book of Proverbs. I took a somewhat unusual approach by asking the participants, what is the opposite of wisdom? The response, of course, was “foolishness.” In the Bible, there is a great deal taught about...