I attended a conference years ago and stayed in the home of some local church members. The church hosting the conference had grown extremely large, with Sunday attendance in the thousands. The family I stayed with spoke of former days when their main teaching pastor wasn’t so well-known. They longed for those years when the […]

The three equally important qualities that will facilitate healthy conflict resolution in marriage are truth, humility, and love. We are considering these three as a triangle. In Parts 1 and 2 we began discussing the first side of the triangle — truth. Now we will discuss the second side — humility.    Humility is really […]

Where does suffering come from? Doesn’t God promise to protect us from suffering? The Book of Job provides divine wisdom meant to help us wrestle with these difficult questions by exploring the moral complexities of one godly man’s suffering. Here are five observations from Job’s suffering to instruct us: Job was a true believer in […]

I am surprised that after so many decades I still remember one remarkable conversation as the best I’ve ever had outside of my immediate family. I’ve often reflected on it with amazement.  A cousin by marriage met me in a restaurant in a suburb outside of Washington, D.C. I didn’t know him well. Since I […]

We don’t create unity among God’s people. That was already accomplished at the cross when Jesus died to “create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace” (Ephesians 2:15). In the Ephesian context, Paul was speaking of the unity that comes to all Jews and Gentiles who are in union […]

Remember the “triangular” conflict resolution strategy we are discussing in this four-part series, with the three equally important sides being truth, humility, and love. In Part 1 we began discussing the first side of the triangle — truth — with two points: First, marriage must be grounded in the truth of the gospel, centering around […]

The beginning of my loss of innocence came the day I discovered that a toy plastic disk fit nicely into a gumball machine — never mind that the toy disk was worth more than a penny. The value of the theft was small, but the resulting guilt was more than a penny’s worth. It pressed […]

Some time between 1950 and 1952 I saw the hole to hell. I was three or four years of age. We were living in Fordyce, Arkansas where my father pastored the First Baptist Church.  The hole to hell could be seen on the main road leading through the residential area by the flag pole in […]

You might find this surprising, but the greetings that begin Ephesians help us to think about the birth of the church in Ephesus, about church planting today, and even about our individual conversions. Here are those verses: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God. To the saints who are in Ephesus, […]