As we have opportunity, let us work for the good of all, Galatians 6:10. The word behind opportunity is the word for a season. A window. The right moment for a certain thing. A farmer knows the difference between time passing and the week his crop is ready, and the second one does not wait on his schedule. So, most of the good in front of you is a window that opens, and it will not stay open.  Read More

Surrender runs against our oldest instinct. Since we could talk, we've been protecting ourselves. Defending our version of the story. Making sure we don't get the short end of the stick. Nobody had to teach us that. It came free with being human. So when God asks for the last room in the house, everything in us wants to hand him the key to a different one.  Read More

Have you ever done the right thing badly? There is a chapter in the Old Testament where a whole crowd of people did exactly that. What happened to them next is very surprising.  Read More

Some of us are naturally easygoing, and some of us are not, and neither one of those is a virtue. What matters is what a person does with the power he has. The gentle brother is the one who could win the argument and doesn't need to. It's the sister who knows what would end the conversation and never says it. Gentleness shows up at the moment you could and don't.  Read More

This Sunday we'll sit with a couple of questions that Barnabas puts to every growing church: When you look around a room full of God's people, what do you actually see — the grace, or the things that still bug you? And when God is clearly at work, are we willing to do the unglamorous, joyful work of walking alongside the people he's bringing in?   Read More

And Jesus, standing beside a withered fig tree in the last week of His life, looked at people staring up at mountains like that and said something almost too good to believe. "Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, 'Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him." (Mark 11:22–23, CSB)  Read More

The richest things in Scripture usually don't come from reading more chapters. They come from paying closer attention to the chapter already open in front of us.  Read More

Colossians 2:11–14 is one of the most hopeful paragraphs Paul ever wrote. Read it slowly and notice who is doing the work. God made you alive. God forgave you. God erased the debt. God nailed it to the cross. Every verb belongs to Him. You are not the one doing the saving.  Read More

2 Timothy 2 is, among other things, a chapter about how we fight with words. Paul warns Timothy about it three separate times. Verse 14: do “not wrangle about words.” Verse 16: “avoid worldly and empty chatter.” Verse 23: “refuse foolish and ignorant speculations, knowing that they produce quarrels.” Three separate warnings in one short chapter are not Paul running low on material or talking points. He is circling something.  Read More

...when the truth is going to cost you something to say — the friendship, the comfort, the awkward silence — do you say it anyway? Most of us think "speaking the truth in love" means being nice while we say hard things. Paul's example is much more than that. He says the hard thing because of love — because a brother was drifting and needed a friend who cared enough to stop him.   Read More

Paul's question is challenging: are we the boat that gets blown around by all of it — or have we grown up into something the wind can't move? Then comes the most important part. Three words: "speaking the truth in love" (Ephesians 4:15). That's the whole difference between a church that stays four years old for thirty years and a church that grows up.  Read More

... the truth that does the sanctifying isn't a file of facts you carry around. Think of the difference between a flashlight and a sunrise. A flashlight is yours — you aim it where you want and switch it off when it's inconvenient. The dawn is nothing like that. You don't carry the sunrise. It rises on you, warms you, and shows you the road you're actually standing on.  Read More