Encouragement to help you through the week.
Beloved, Have you ever wondered why God includes some incredibly difficult to swallow and hard to understand texts in the Bible? It’s a question I’ve been pondering this week as I have wrestled with my sermon text for Sunday morning…
Beloved, It was probably not the first time I had read the verse, but it was the first time I had really read it. God’s slew of questions to Moses were like a wrecking ball plowing into my understanding of physical disability. …
Beloved, My parents’ pastor, Dane Ortlund, taught a Sunday school class last week titled “Biblical Wisdom in a Volatile Election Cycle.” The whole of the lesson was excellent, but I wanted to share with you the various applications of biblical…
Beloved, Tomorrow at 3:00am I depart for presbytery (i.e, the assembly of the elders of the regional church). Don’t worry! I’ll have my thermos full of piping-hot bulletproof coffee. The anticipation of less-than-optimal sleep, the eight-plus-hour drive, and the deep…
Beloved, I love a good cold plunge, and while it wasn’t exactly sub-zero temperature, I got a free one at Cloudland Canyon on Monday. The family hiked down to Cherokee Falls and to my great delight, there was actually a…
Beloved, As tradition has it, the Latin phrase homo unius libri was coined by Thomas Aquinas. It simply means “a man of one book.” Aquinas wrote that he feared such a person. Why? Because to devote one’s life to the study of…
Beloved, I did it again. One of you asked during Sunday’s fellowship lunch how my family was doing, and I responded by expressing how busy life is right now. It’s something I’ve really been trying to stop doing. But bad…
Beloved, On Sunday we began a new Sunday school class titled Seeking Him: Liturgical Rhythms for a Worshipful Life and Family. We spent a good part of our first lesson wrestling with the distinction between commanding and commending. I was arguing…
Beloved, This week I stumbled across a poem of George Herbert (a 16th century Christian poet) written for Trinity Sunday (the Sunday after Pentecost), but I think it is a fitting poem for every Sunday (truly, for every day!). Listen…
Beloved, Last Sunday we considered Paul’s exhortation to be continuously exercising our souls unto the cultivation of Godlikeness (1 Tim. 4:6-10). The apostle is calling young Timothy and each of us to become spiritual athletes who have the strength and…
Beloved, Have you ever woken up on the wrong side of the bed? It happened to me this morning after a bizarre dream about a gregarious priest who was drawing away Cornerstone members to join his church. I woke up…
Beloved,As an encouragement in the grace of fasting, here is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Restless Devotion, addressing the subject: The hungry soul that rouses itself to lay hold of God for restoration, often expresses that hunger by forgoing physical food.…