In every choice we make there is a cost to us and a benefit. If we stay where we are, we stay where we are comfortable, but we lose the freshness of something new in our lives. If we choose to move or change, we lose the comfort of the known. In every decision there […]

Being a Christian is not about preaching. It’s not about testifying. It’s not about looking good to someone else so we can draw someone to the Lord. First and foremost, it’s about walking the walk; it’s about living the talk, what Jesus taught, in your life. It’s not about putting on some attitude or the […]

The truth about our lives is so simple: we live every moment in the presence of God. God is present in every event, every plant/rock/person/animal. God is the interweaving of all life, the glue, if you will, that holds everything together, that connects all elements in the universe. God is the Creator of all and […]

Jesus was a radical teacher in 1st century Palestine. His message is just as radical for our times. First, and foremost, he brought forward the commandment from Deuteronomy 6:5 to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength. And how are we to love God? With all of ourselves! This means that God […]

“Our God is an awesome God, there is nothing that he cannot do…” This is a song that my grandchildren learned in Vacation Bible School a few years back. It’s true, our God is an awesome God, but not just in the muscle-flexing ways of the children’s song. God is awesomely mysterious and yet knowable; […]

I write often that the Holy Spirit’s job is to transform us from the inside out, but what does that mean in someone’s life? This week I want to list some of the effects of the God’s transforming Spirit on us. I hope that you will offer up your own experiences of transformation in the […]

Think of the Holy Spirit as the tuner of our souls and personalities. Like a piano tuner tackles a piano that has long sat idled, the Holy Spirit takes our neglected souls and our existing personalities and attunes them so that they agree in pitch and harmonize well. He adjusts the “keys” and the “strings” […]

In living the Life of the Spirit we give up the need for control, the selfish desires that rule our lives, the right to call the shots, and much more. We live in the present, with what we are given now to do, with God calling the plays. You could call God the Great Coach. […]

How might we summarize Jesus’ teachings and the life he modeled? We need a guide, a condensed version, a rule to compare ourselves to, a standard. Jesus said so many things, but he saw them all as fulfilling the law of the Old Testament which is about love. So in this essay I will endeavor […]

“Imaginary friend in the sky. Delusional. Sad,” commented one of my Facebook readers recently on a day I was writing about surrendering to God. What he wrote caused me to think about how I would describe God. The picture of God he painted is the one I had as a child: an angry God, a […]