A few weeks ago I preached at a Christian High School chapel. In one sense speaking to teens is different than speaking to adults. The audience was made up of people young enough to be my own children. People that are growing up in a culture very different than the one I grew up in. Young people who are into things I haven’t yet heard of. What do I have to give the young ones? I’ve been preaching for 20 years, and over the past two decades I have come to see that my words accomplish nothing. My most persuasive arguments, my most passionate pleas, and my earnest articulation is powerless to change the human heart. My words cannot heal the soul or help the weary, and they certainly cannot raise the spiritually dead to new life. Yet, I believe expository preaching is the means the Holy ...

“I have a tough life,” my five-year-old cousin said. “Really? Why is that?” I asked. Folding his arms, he looked up at me with his big blue eyes as he rattled off his complaints. “Well, I get spankings, I get time out, and I have to clean my room!” I couldn’t help bursting out in laughter. In return, he just looked at me quizzically as if silently asking, “Why are you laughing? I’m serious!” After regaining my composure, I shook my head and said, “I don’t think that’s too terrible, buddy. I think you’re gonna be okay.” Later that day my cousin’s complaint made me wonder: How often does God smile down at us and say, “Everything is going to be all right, my child”? In our fallen world, we’re constantly bombarded with situations that tempt us to complain about how tough our lives are. Sometim...

A life of constant chaos is far from what God intends. In “Crazy Busy,” a mercifully short book about a really big problem, pastor Kevin DeYoung seeks the restful cure we’ve all been too busy to find. Originally published November 11, 2013.

Not that we dare to classify or compare ourselves with some of those who are commending themselves. But when they measure themselves by one another and compare themselves with one another, they are without understanding. 2 Corinthians 10:12     I know the comparison game well. I have played it many times, whether it was comparing my fashion style to those of my friends, comparing my children’s behavior to those of others, or comparing my lack of organization skills to those who seem super organized. I have played this game often and lost every time. Comparison reveals our brokenness. The reason we compare ourselves is because deep inside we are dissatisfied with what we have and who we are. Whether we feel good or bad after we compare ourselves to someone else, we do it beca...

The social media landscape can make the average person wonder if he can make an impact in the world today. If you take a look at well-known pastors, you can’t help but notice they are prolific, not only in printed books, but in tweets, blog posts, and Facebook likes. One might derive an invalid conclusion from this phenomenon, thinking, “If well-known pastors are making a big impact, and have a massive social media following, then if I’m going to have a big impact, I need a social media presence, too.” Two premises are untrue in this line of thinking. First, it falsely assumes that what is true for well-known pastors must be true for not-so-well-known pastors. There are enough differences in between the two to steer us away from such one-to-one correlations. Second, it falsely assumes that...

On a recent trip across town I decided to use the map app that came with my phone for directions. When the audio fell out of sync with the Bluetooth in my truck, in an instant I went from being on a routine trip to a lost expedition because of an unexpected glitch. While going through life we hit many detours, potholes, and accidents. Some will be as small as a lost GPS signal. Others will be life changing, like a job layoff just as you need to pay a child’s tuition, a relationship break-up when you think you have found bliss, or a spiritual failure when you were supposed to be on top of your game. For these times when the straight and narrow path takes us through long and exceedingly dark tunnels, Psalm 121 shows that God’s people are not given to our feeble resources alone, for we have h...

Jesus Feminist.That’s one of the more well-crafted book titles I’ve read in a long time. It’s intended to strike at an apparent contradiction resident within the psyche of the evangelical culture. Two terms, normally in opposition to one another in our theological, biblical, political and social constructs as conservative Christians, are brought together in a juxtaposition. The volume itself is intent on demonstrating the simultaneous validity of both following Jesus and being a feminist activist. The title gets the reader right to the central question of the book – Can you follow Jesus and be a feminist? Sarah Bessey’s, Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible’s View of Women, Exploring God’s Radical Notion that Women Are People Too, is a new offering in the ever growing genre o...

Christianity.com: Are natural disasters a sign of God’s judgment?-Michael Horton from christianitydotcom2 on GodTube. Are Disasters a Sign of God’s Judgment? There’s a place in John’s Gospel where Jesus is confronted by the religious leaders, who talk about a man who was born blind. And they ask Jesus, trying to trap him in a theological question, “Who sinned? This man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” And Jesus said, “Neither. He was born blind for this moment, to show the glory of God.” In other words, as difficult as it is to swallow, there’s something bigger than you and your personal happiness, and that is God and his purposes displaying his mercy.  He was born blind up to this point for God’s purposes, because h...

By all appearances, we Americans still cling to the Thanksgiving holiday, setting aside a few hours for a special meal with family and friends before turning on the football game or heading to the mall for a deal on electronics.  But we have long since abandoned any idea of a Thanksgiving season, an extended period in which to anticipate the holiday, reflect on its significance, and live out its meaning.  Christmas decorations go up in the stores as the Halloween decorations come down.  The calendar page turns to November and the Hallmark Channel begins its “Countdown to Christmas” programming.  With admirable candor, Amazon.com simply trumpets the “Countdown to Black Friday.”  Sigh.  This is sad for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact th...

Busyness in ministry is an epidemic. As our world moves faster and faster, pastors are being sucked into a vortex of tasks, projects, emails, and goals. The problem is that when you get overwhelmed, you get tunnel vision. Your perspective of your church becomes as narrow as your to-do list. What inevitably happens is that the important, but not urgent aspects of ministry get pushed to the bottom of the list. Yet, if we are honest, it is in those important, but not urgent areas where we make the biggest impact. It is where the best opportunities lie. But we sacrifice that for an empty email inbox. What opportunities are you missing out on because you are overwhelmed in ministry? Below I list three opportunities busy pastors might miss when they get too task focused. I’ll warn you, these are...

Over the past several years the church seems to have experienced some degree of gospel renewal. We now have conferences like The Gospel Coalition and Together for the Gospel, a fresh emphasis on preaching the gospel from all of Scripture, and lots and lots of books with the word “gospel” somewhere in the title. I think this is a good thing and consider myself largely in step with this movement. But there is a danger of turning “gospel” into a buzzword. A few years ago, member in our church expressed confusion about how often our church’s teaching used the word “gospel.” In her thinking, the gospel was the plan of salvation and she found it confusing when we talked about the gospel being the solution to this or that problem. But she also said that when we started talking about the person an...

“Now that we no longer have a Judeo-Christian basis for our country,” explained evangelical theologian Norman Geisler in a recent interview, “we are realizing that we are losing all our freedoms along with it.” According to the Christian Post, Geisler went on to say, “Our job is to speak to the culture and help re-establish our Judeo-Christian basis or our freedom is going to be swept away.” There is no question that Geisler is correct about our freedom. As I wrote several weeks ago, our liberty is being compromised beginning with our religious freedom — the freedom on which all other freedoms depend. And there’s no question that Geisler is correct that our freedoms are founded on a Judeo-Christian worldview. History makes it clear that once you take that worldview away, fr...