The choice between God and the world We can see it in everyone we know: the lack of self-knowledge and self-love. It’s evident in second-guessing oneself in everything. In not expressing who we are in the world, in not using our own voice to express ourselves. It’s evident in having to perform and not being […]

What we believe about ourselves carries no weight with God. Long before the world began in the early stages of creation, God made us in his image, declared us good and blessed us.[Genesis 1:27-31] And in his eyes we are still good and made in his image and blessed. Do you think that the God […]

I think there are many ways to look at and to experience the spiritual journey. Here is one that I think is quite true to the essence of the journey. In this scenario there are four steps along the way. The first step has to do with acknowledging the yearning within us for more, for […]

On a recent August morning I was reading the Bible Workbench lesson on Jacob wrestling with a man(or angel as some translations say) in preparation for the meeting at my church that day; tears are flowing from my eyes. As I ponder my reaction, I realize that my life[all our lives] has been consumed with […]

Life is lived on two levels in this world whether we are aware of the second one or not. Our lives are like the ocean in which all the waves, choppiness, white caps and agitation take place in the top fifteen feet; below this surface busyness flow long, slow currents, for us, the longer arcs […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be in this world, but not of the world.[John 17:14-19] And I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what that would mean to you or me. First, let’s talk about what it doesn’t mean: 1. What it is not about is us being above […]

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. […]

We are so steeped in the culture, we don’t even know where the culture ends and we begin. So much of the culture slipped in under the radar of our pre-cognitive brains when we were small children that we can’t see what in us belongs to the culture and what belongs to our self. This […]

Surrendering our lives to God is the dividing line in our lives. Before surrendering we live in the physical world that we see and the world that we’ve been taught to expect. After surrendering we still live in what we call the “real” world, but our eyes start to focus on what Paul in 2 […]

Faith in God is a crucial issue in any year, but it is even more important in this year that started with the nuclear disaster in Japan and the Arab Spring, now that unrest has also surfaced in Russia, Israel and England, and governments struggle to tackle the problems left over from the global financial […]