Pursue peace with everyone, and holiness — without it no one will see the Lord. Make sure that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no root of bitterness springs up, causing trouble and defiling many, Hebrews 12:14-15. He calls it a root. Roots grow quietly, underground, where nobody is looking. By the time anything shows above the surface, the root has been there a long while.  Read More

We do not get to decide who the Lord will save. We do get to decide what the first word will be. Somebody near you has a past that everybody knows about and they are sitting in the dark wondering whether anybody will come and whether the one who comes will say enemy or brother. Ananias had heard from many about this man. He went anyway and he said brother anyway, and then he said the rest. That one word did not finish the job. If you have ever been the one in the dark waiting for a word, or the one sent to say it, come and hear the rest of the story.   Read More

f listening is so plainly good for us, why is it so hard? Scripture has a good deal to say about pride, about weariness, and about our habit of drifting toward the voices that only tell us what we'd like to hear. Proverbs doesn't soften any of it. *The wounds of a friend are trustworthy,* Proverbs 27:6.  Read More

This Sunday begins a four-week series called Words That Build. Our Vision book gives October the theme Building the Body in Love, and Paul describes the body of Christ building itself up in love (Ephesians 4:16). A surprising amount of that building happens through what comes out of our mouths.  Read More

The city is Samaria and the situation is about as bad as can be. An enemy army has camped around it long enough that the food is gone. The chapter before this one says a donkey’s head was selling for eighty shekels of silver (2 Kings 6:25), and it records worse than that, things a person does not want to read twice. Inside the walls, people are starving, which is typical when a siege is taking place.  Read More

Strangers have a way of showing up. He moves in three doors down, takes the job at the shop, walks into the building on a Sunday and sits by himself. He didn't come with a need you can fix. He came with nothing but himself, and the question is whether there's room. God tells Israel how to treat the foreigner living among them, and then tells them why. You are to love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt, Leviticus 19:34.  Read More

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