The beginning of a New Year is considered by most of us to be a perfect time to “make a fresh start;” “ begin again;” or “turn over a new leaf.” I am sure making those resolutions can be valuable and very profitable experiences, and there is nothing intrinsically unchristian about those ideas. However, some time ago I found myself growing increasingly uncomfortable with the whole idea of New Year’s resolutions. As I thought about it, I figured out why. Obviously, no one is…

Imagine yourself as a shepherd in the countryside around Bethlehem on the first Christmas night over 2000 years ago. An angel suddenly appears to you and your fellow shepherds, surrounded by “the glory of the Lord” and announces that the long-awaited savior of your people, the Jews, had come on that very day!  A multitude of angels then join the original one and began “praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!’” (Luke 3:13, 14).…

Peter Ducy of Fox News was reporting from the “Roy Moore for Senate” election watch party the night of the recent senatorial election in Alabama. According to Ducy, as the returns were coming in and the projections began to predict a Moore defeat, the tension, worry and consternation began to grow among Moore’s associates. However, Moore remained calm himself and expressed something like this: “God is in charge; if we win that will be fine; if not, that will be fine as well. God’s…

If you have been a Christian for any length of time, you have undoubtedly been encouraged to grow in your faith by “studying the Bible,” “having a daily quiet time, “ or “memorizing the Word.” We are told the more diligent we are in following these Christian disciplines the more we will grow in our spiritual lives, i.e., the more successful we will become in obeying the commands in Scripture. I grew up with this well-known adage: “Either the Bible will keep you from…

As we have discussed what the Bible calls “walking by faith” or “living by faith”  over the past weeks, I have emphasized that these familiar, much-used phrases actually represent a little-experienced way to live. Deciding to be a Christian by believing that Jesus died for our sins does not mean that we are “walking by faith,” also called in the Bible, “walking in the Spirit” or “living in the Spirit.” Nor do these biblical terms refer to me, now that I am a Christian,…

“Have you retired from actively, aggressively serving God?” Hearing that question and sensing the challenge in it, I believe the person being asked, more often than not, is immediately overcome with 1.) energy-sapping fatigue, or 2.) crushing guilt for “putting his hand to the plow” and then “drawing back”, or 3.) maybe even anger, remembering again the hypocrisy, politics, empire building and greed he saw in the church. The purpose of a question like that is generally to get you to evaluate your life…

There is nothing as crucial as living in positive reality, by faith alone, rather than in a negative movie film by trying to be “good.” As we saw last week, we are living in one or the other. The irony is that by living life in a movie with the film a negative, the very characteristics we see in our lives that we desperately try to eliminate as being “bad things” are really “good” things. Being a sinner, losing, being weak, being last, being…

A few mornings ago I woke up in the middle of a dream in which I was watching a movie. I have since completely forgotten what the movie was about, but I remember vividly what the movie looked like. The moving pictures were in negative film, just like the negatives that were always included with the positive prints in the package we would received back from the film developer, but in my dream they were in a movie film I was watching. What should…

All day, every day, God is busily at work spreading the word of what happened at the cross throughout His universe, a word that many either haven’t heard, don’t understand or actively resist. The word of the cross is this: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Many of us, and I use the plural advisedly and without hesitation, have literally worn ourselves out trying our best to take this Gospel to the…

As a young married couple in the Summer of 1973, Jill and I had just returned to Seattle from an exhilarating one-year adventure. We had lived in a Christian community right in the middle of the hippies in Isla Vista, California, the location of the Santa Barbara branch of the University of California, UCSB. We had rented out our house in the University District in Seattle while we were gone and now, with 2.5 children—our daughter Ramah would be born that Fall—we were headed…