Author: S&P

The motto, “good is the enemy of great” applies as much to a church’s small groups as anything else. Many churches aim too low. The reason for this is not that small groups don’t provide many benefits for churches, but that they provide so many. It is easy to focus on the lesser benefits rather than the best ones. The unfortunate result is that people do not grow and are not served to the extent t...

We all know what it’s like to do the right thing for the wrong reason. But what about the reverse? Have you ever done the wrong thing for (what you thought was) the right reason? Your motives were pure, but you still blew it. Motives Matter One thing that separates biblical Christianity from almost every other religion is its laser-like focus on our hearts. Our Creator cares what we do, to be sure...

Discipleship ministry is people work and people can be difficult. Some folks seem to have the spiritual gift of pointing out everything you and the church could do better. Others have impossibly high expectations that despite your good intentions you never seem to meet. Still others are just plain ornery: cantankerous old (or young) cusses that fit the profile of grumpy goats, better than cuddly s...

“It is well and good for the preacher to base his sermon on the Bible, but he better get to something relevant pretty quickly, or we start mentally to check out.” That stunningly clear sentence reflects one of the most amazing, tragic, and lamentable characteristics of contemporary Christianity: an impatience with the Word of God. The sentence above comes from Mark Galli, senior managing edi...

We recently returned from a sweet time of vacation. We live in Chicago, and most of our family lives in Dallas. So my wife, three small kiddos, and I took a two-day road travel, staying overnight in St. Louis both ways. Our kids spent a whole week with grandparents. We went to the Ft. Worth Zoo, Lambert’s Café (home of the throwed rolls) near Springfield Missouri, St. Louis’s City Museum and the A...

In his book Brain Rules, John Medina tells the intriguing story of Dr. Oliver Sacks, a British neurologist, and one of his patients, an elderly woman who “suffered a massive stroke in the back region of her brain that left her with a most unusual deficit: She lost her ability to pay attention to anything that was to her left.” Medina explains the effect this had on her perceptive abilities: She co...

Suffering sometimes feels like slipping, sinking, suffocating. As the Psalms testify, suffering can engulf and consume, leaving you groping for a handhold. Suffering can swallow you whole, blocking any light from outside. There’s no way to make suffering not hurt. Some pains simply need to run their course, and some will keep coursing through you long after most people have forgotten about your tr...

I am often overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude to God for placing me in a Christian home with a wise and godly father who diligently taught me the Scriptures; and, although I didn’t know the saving grace of God until I was an adult, there are certain inestimably valuable things my father taught me when I was a teenager that continue to have an impact on me today. One of these was the way in whic...

Would you feel guilty if you were a millionaire? There is a strand of evangelical thinking that suspects, if not believes outright, that having a lot of money (and in some cases just a little surplus) is something to feel guilty about. John Piper has called people to a wartime lifestyle. He writes, “In wartime we spend money differently—there is austerity, not for its own sake, but because there a...

With all the time and attention focused on Easter a few weeks ago (and rightly so), you could hardly blame people for overlooking the holiday that fell on April 22nd: Earth Day. First celebrated in 1970, Earth Day is now observed in over 190 countries by more than 1 billion people every year. Such widespread popularity has led its organizer, Denis Hayes, to call Earth Day “the largest secular holi...

Jesus’ Last Supper provides the basis for one of the most important observances of the Christian church: the Lord’s Supper, also known as Eucharist or Communion in different traditions. From the earliest days of the church, Christians have re-enacted the Lord’s Supper in accordance with Jesus’ instruction that his followers “do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). The New Covenant The signific...

High school graduation is a rite of passage unlike any other. You move from being treated like a child (legally) to being counted an adult, both in society and in any academic setting you might enter. Colleges aren’t even allowed to discuss your grades with your parents apart from your consent. Childhood is over. Adulthood beckons. How should you respond to the blessing and challenge of graduation...