Author: S&P

There’s a line in To Kill a Mocking Bird; “You can choose your friends, but you sho’ can’t choose your family.” The point being, we can’t run away from our responsibilities to our families. You can choose to stop being friends with someone. But you can’t choose to stop being related to someone. That observation is tremendously important when it comes to how Christians should think about the church...

Image Credit: Patch Adams 8/12/2014, Time.com Recently a friend and I were talking about a third friend who is facing undiagnosed, yet very obvious, mental illness. Our mutual friend, “Bob” (real identity hidden), refuses to see a doctor. He thinks everyone in his world has a hidden agenda to harm him. In speaking to my friend, I said, “You know what Bob really needs? He needs a doctor like Patch ...

It’s “shark week” on the Discovery Channel—TV’s annual celebration of man’s fascination with the ocean’s most feared and, perhaps, most misunderstood species. Since its inception in 1987, viewers have voraciously taken in hours of makos, hammerheads, and great whites weaving and darting through shadowy waters while an ominous score attends every menacing move. Courageous captains, camera operators...

Are you ever overwhelmed by how difficult it is be to live a life that is pleasing to God? If the temptations of the world and the sin within our own hearts isn’t enough, Satan is also working overtime to see to our destruction, downfall, or weakening. He has no compassion, he doesn’t care how hard life is for you or all the things you have gone through. He rejoices in our difficulties and only wa...

My pastor liked to crack jokes about being a “professional good guy.” Others—including his kids—remarked how he got paid to live right and make good decisions. The implied argument, of course, was that his words were less relevant to the everyday man. Indeed, in seminary, I learned of a professor who refused ordination for fear that people would stop listening to him. Below are five ridiculously b...

How can Christians experience the peace of God? This question was posed to me by a friend once. I explained to him that I usually have to start by preaching to myself, especially on days when my dad’s dementia affects me the most. Here’s what I preach to my own heart: Romans 5:1 states that the Christian has peace with God through our Lord Jesus. It is Christ alone who enables the Christian ...

Maybe it’s the smug servant Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Perhaps it’s the extremely suspicious Boston community in Nathaniel Hawthrone’s The Scarlett Letter. Or it could be the more recent TV drama named for the location of the infamous Salem witch trials of early colonial America. High school history books continue to tell tales of America’s Pharisaic progenito...

Many pastors, this one included, have a hard time opening up and being vulnerable with those around them. The lethal cocktail of pride and insecurity, combined with the belief that people need us to be an ever-stable, always-faithful, never-failing rock, causes some pastors to suffer in silence, struggle in secret, and suffocate in isolation. This sad tendency is destructive for the church, but de...

“We homeschool.” It’s amazing how loaded a two-word answer can be. If I’m in a room full of public school teachers, it can come across as condescending and dismissive of public education. If I’m in a room full of home school parents, it can make me sound like a hero. If I’m surrounded by Christian school parents, it might elicit pity. I don’t think there is any more divisive topic among Christian ...

Should we hate sin? Absolutely! Psalm 97:10 makes this plain: “O you who love the Lord, hate evil!” That’s simple enough. Right? But why should we hate sin? God’s Glory is Supreme This first reason to hate sin takes supreme precedence. God’s salvation narrative more than anything is about his glory. He is a glory hound who does not share with anyone or anything. His collective attributes give us c...

The preaching event involves not only God, the preacher and the biblical text, but the people who listen to the sermon. Unfortunately, writing and teaching in the field of preaching has focused predominantly on getting the text right (exegesis), getting the style right (rhetoric) and most importantly getting God right (theology). These are, no doubt, essential concerns and skills fo...

When I started at my job a little over a year ago, I was the only Christian in my department. Since then, I’ve referred a few Christian friends, who have referred even more Christian friends, and there are now eight of us. This growth excited me for two reasons. First, I now had support in living out the Christian life at my work. Second, it increased an evangelistic witness for my non-Christian c...