When happy, we possess something we love; when anxious, something we love is at risk; when despondent, something we love has been lost; when angry, something we love is being stolen or kept from us.
When you have to manage the world, please everyone, earn more than you did last year, and work off five pounds, you will be driven. If not, you run the risk of being un-American or even un-Christian b...
When you know that the kingdom is God’s alone (though he gives it to us), that is the only thing that can lead to peace and rest. Owners are the ones who do all the worrying; stewards simply listen to...
When your emotions feel muted or always low, when you are unable to experience the highs and lows you once did, the important question is not How can I figure out what I have done wrong? but it is, Wh...
You never expected that God himself would, by his representatives, actually come close to unclean people and touch them. The Holy One is not human. The triune God is not human. Don’t limit God’s chara...
Your future includes manna. It will come. There is no sense devising future scenarios now because God will do more than you anticipate.
Beneath our questions about God’s generosity and his care for our needs is something darker. What we really care about is our wants.
God's love is a costly love. It never takes the easy path away from relationships. Instead, it plots how to move towards other people. It thinks creatively of ways to surprise them with love.
Love breaks the hold of individualism; it builds new communities out of the ashes of broken and fragmented relationships.
My wants are what concern me. That’s where the battle must be fought. I
Regarding other people, our problem is that we need them (for ourselves) more than we love them (for the glory of God).
Shame is the deep sense that you are unacceptable because of something you did, something done to you, or something associated with you. You feel exposed and humiliated. Or, to strengthen the language...
Sin can certainly be a cause of depression, but you must be careful about connecting the dots between the two. If you are being honest, you will always find sin in your life. Everyone does. That doesn...
The details of how faith works in spiritual warfare are well known but easily forgotten.
The feeling of emptiness is usually a sign that we have put our trust in something that can’t sustain us. It reminds us that we were created to trust in our heavenly Father and nothing else. We were c...
The important thing was the shedding of blood. Sounds barbaric, but the Old Testament was reminding us that there was a significant cost involved in moving from unclean to clean. You didn’t have to pa...
These days, shame is emerging from the shadows and beginning to have its own identity. For example, if you talk about guilt to people under thirty, you often get blank stares. But if you talk about wo...
These words point in the right direction, but some of them, such as embarrassed, insulted, different, and ignored, can fade with time. Real shame requires more intensity. That’s why the language of th...
To paraphrase Augustine, if you want to know your God-given gifts, first know that the purpose of spiritual gifts is to bring unity to the church. Then love God and do what you feel like doing. But th...
We crave autonomy. Autonomy is closely linked to arrogance. They are both expressions of human pride, but autonomy suggests that we want to be separate from more than over. We want to establish the ru...
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