Fisher of Men

I’m in the middle of a move and, well, it isn’t the most fun I’ve ever had. Don’t get me wrong; I’m excited about where we’re moving to. Lord willing, in a couple weeks I’ll transplant my family to England so I can do graduate work at a university I’ve long dreamed of studying at. And it’s a stunning privilege to even have the choice to move somewhere, as opposed to being forced to move by oppression or deprivation. Still, for the moment, we’re stuck in between. We left our home in Louisville a couple weeks ago, and we’re staying with family for another couple weeks before setting out. At this stage, then, the move has been all undoing, all negation. We removed our home from the apartment it occupied, leaving only the faintest traces of a life. In the manner of a cleaning, we worked our wa...

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” (Gen. 1:26) What It Means to “Have Dominion” Over Creation One reason Christians have been particularly weak in dealing with ecological issues and the deterioration of the natural environment is a misunderstanding of what it means to “have dominion” over creation. Dominion does not mean destruction, but responsibility. It is important to avoid flawed convictions about the right and power of humankind in relation to the rest of the natural world. Francis Schaeffer elaborates: Fallen man has dominion over nature, but he uses it wrongly. The ...

The “celebrity pastor” is now a thing. Maybe it’s always been a thing (1 Cor. 1:10-17), but over the past few years it has become a source of concern and consternation for many. On the one hand I do see a problem, and on the other hand I can’t help but feel that some speak against popular preachers out of a sense of jealousy. I do not think that a pastor whose “platform” is large, influence is broad, and following is numerous is a celebrity pastor. At least, not in a bad way. The real problem is leadership that loses sight of the glory of Christ and focuses on the glory of man. Or, at least one man. But Celebrity Pastors do not simply build themselves. They are built with the help of fans. It’s not wrong or idolatrous to get a photo with a person y...

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. It’s important because the church is a family. That’s not just a sentimental way of describing how much you love your local church. It is a profound, radical truth that changes everything. When told that his mother and brothers were asking for him, Jesus responded by saying “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matt 12:50). In Matthew 17, Jesus ...

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 Adams—one who can disarm him with laughter, win his trust, and then give him the treatment he needs.” Raising the name of fictitious doctor immediately pointed us to Robin Williams, the actor who brought his humorous ways to the screen role of a mental patient turned physician. Less than a week later, the world heard the tragic news of Williams’s death. We wonder to ourselves how someone who seeme...

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, and divers lap up every life-threatening minute while viewers like me safely watch from afar. After watching shark week, you might tend to agree that the job of being a shark diver is one of the most terrifying and physically dangerous jobs in the world. Just last night, one diver in a segment (“Great White Serial Killer”) tried to describe what it was like to stand in a protective cage as it wa...

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 wants to add to them. Satan is cunning and crafty. He is also more powerful than we give him credit for and therefore a being to be guarded against and fought against. He has the experience of all kinds of evil on his side as well as the fact that he never grows tired and never gives up spewing his hatred for Christ and his bride. He hates them because . . . they have escaped out of his hand, they o...

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 brief biographies of “common” folk who never received a dime as professional good people. Perpetua (ad 180–202) Early Christians were no strangers to persecution—even to the point of death. The account of Vibia Perpetua’s martyrdom remains one of history’s most powerful. Augustine of Hippo found Perpetua’s story so influential, he delivered numerous sermons about her. Perpetua was a noblewoman, mot...

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 to have a new identity in Him— this the very basis for implementing the peace of God. Grounding his statement in Romans 5:1 with the word “therefore” the Apostle Paul connects what he has previously spoken in Romans 1-4 to what he will say in Romans 5:1-11. In Romans 5:1 he lays out what Christ did in His death, burial and resurrection resulting in the sinner—formerly at enmity with God—being give...

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 progenitors and their overly concerned moralism with attempts to establish God’s pure “city on a hill.” Many of us have grown up with an understanding of Puritans as those gloomy religious folk who found joy in making sure others had none. The tale of spoilsport Puritans continues to be told, and it couldn’t be further from the truth. Here are 5 myths about Puritans which you may still be...

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 deadly for the pastor. I hear a lot about growing our churches, preaching, and leadership, but little about the need for pastors to grow in their vulnerability. This is a problem. If you’re a pastor, I want to share three reasons I think you and I need to strive for healthy vulnerability with those in our lives. 1. Vulnerability Is Humbling The Apostle Peter said, “Humble yourselves, therefore, unde...

“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 parents than the topic of education. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s a way to have strong convictions about the type of schooling we prefer for our children in this season of life and still acknowledge that this is a complex issue and an issue that might lead Christian people to different conclusions. I’ve lived on all sides of this issue. As a Christian school kid, I thought, for long...