Jesus calls us to really look at the type of person He was in this world and to set our goal to be as like Him as we can be. Of course, He will be showing us how to get there as we follow Him, but if that goal is to be realized, we will […]
In my daily reading of Paul David Tripp’s New Morning Mercies: a Daily Gospel Devotional last month, I came across this passage about the true and full nature of faith: “The belief of the heart and mind is an essential ingredient of faith, but it does not summarize all that faith is. True biblical […]
The most important thing to do after committing to follow Jesus is to put that commitment ahead of all other priorities in our lives. The way we demonstrate our love of God lies in the way that prayer shapes our lives. Prayer is the two-way communication between us and God, facilitated and encouraged by the […]
We Americans are in charge of our lives; we get to choose our goals and go after them with all that is within us. But when Jesus calls us to follow Him, we have to look at who we are, how we think, what our priorities are in order to see what stands between us […]
“Nothing matters more than knowing God’s purposes for your life, and nothing can compensate for not knowing them—not success, wealth, fame, or pleasure. Without a Purpose, life is nothing without meaning, activity without direction, and events without reason. Without a purpose, life is trivial, petty, and pointless.”[1] Purpose is revealed to us as we […]
Jesus calls us to follow Him just as He called the disciples at the beginning of His ministry. We are to follow, to accompany Him wherever He would lead us. We would be His students, doing all that He asks of us, learning all we can from the Master Teacher as to how we are […]
As we follow Jesus, one of the things we have to deal with is the attitude, “my way or the highway!” This attitude is ingrained in us as we grow up in our culture. We want things as we want them and not in any other way, shape, or form. This is one of the […]
On August 8th of this year my blog post was about living in the totality of who we are, bringing our full selves to our lives, to whoever we are with and to whatever we are doing. When we’re talking about our Christian lives, above all, we need to be present to God, not to […]
The leaves are turning now—reds and yellows are blossoming on our trees. The temperature is cooling—this week will be in the 60’s in the Charlotte area. As fall is here and winter not far behind, our lives process the loss of green in the landscape and the bareness of the trees to come. We settle […]
The American Church in every denomination is losing membership and the percentage of people who identify as Christians has declined from a high of 73% in 1937 to 70% through 1997 to less than 50% today.[1] Membership in every denomination has declined precipitously. Now we can no longer call ourselves a Christian nation when […]