The Sword of Jesus and the Fifth commandment
Intro Indian culture has a high value for respect for parents. Adult children generally live with their parents until they are married, and even then either make frequent visits or live in a multi generational home. What this leads to is something of a paradox for the Christian ministering in an Indian context. This high…
Make Christianity Hard Again
I grew up in a very interesting strain of Christianity. Now, I don’t know if this was the explicit teaching of my church or just what I felt, but it seemed like the overall message of a Christian’s duty was, “don’t sin, attend church, read your Bible, and tell others about Jesus.” Now, all of…
Why Cosmology Matters
“Actually, we believe that Christianity started at the creation of the world.” I was going back and forth with one of my friends who was giving his account of why he didn’t believe in any religion. He spoke generally about the age of religions. About how Islam was predated by Christianity which was predated by…
From the Courts to the Streets
For my entire life abortion has been legal in all 50 states. Not only has it been legal, but the states have been prohibited from outlawing by a 1973 Supreme Court case called Roe v. Wade. Now, in what is likely, without hyperbole, the biggest move towards justice since the founding of the country, Roe…
Elijah, some bread, and waiting till the morning
One of the strangest stories in the Old Testament is the story of Elijah running from Jezebel in 1 Kings 19. The reason that it strikes me as odd is that it is such a mix of the natural and the supernatural. Let me set the stage. Elijah had just done some of the most…
My Favorite Books of 2021
I know I’m a little bit behind everyone else on my “top 10 books” list, but we just moved to a new city, and I think I’m finally getting back to my old rhythms. These are the top 10 books that I enjoyed in 2021. 10. Evangelism as Exiles-Elliot ClarkClark is painfully biblical, painful because…
Nobody is really a pluralist, and why that’s okay
It is surprising (and oh so refreshing!) to see crossover between our new urban Asian context and where we used to live in the United States. I don’t know yet if the crossover is because our context is becoming more westernized or if it is because the West, in some ways, is becoming more like…
Letters of Recommendation
We don’t like to admit it, but who you know is sometimes as-if not more-important than how good you are at something. We’ve gone through some hiring in our office recently, and a well-connected 3.5 GPA absolutely beats out a 4.0 that nobody knows. It’s hard to overstate the power of a good recommendation. But…
Drilling and Blasting
I don’t know if I can recommend “Center Church” by Timothy Keller enough. I’m not a big “re-reader,” but I’m going through his book again. And I’m so glad I am, the book is full of ways to engage with culture, one of the most helpful being his analogy of drilling and blasting. Keller expresses…
The Untouched Part
I just finished “The Untouched Part” by Eunice-Pauline Olatunji. I’ll be honest, I have some mixed feelings about this book. Though there are some helpful parts, there are also some things I definitely would have done differently. Review The COVID-19 pandemic shook a lot of our categories. A fast-paced, unreflective world forced to stop traveling,…
Job: a poem
Job is a surprisingly encouraging book when we suffer. Not because it makes our suffering any less, but because it kills the lies that make suffering unbearable. Lies that we didn’t think we believed, but can crop up when we see intense suffering, either in our lives or in the lives of others. Lies like,…
Is it complicated or is it difficult?
I have a Bible reading plan, four different Bible apps on my phone, the capability to listen to the Bible on audio, and around 7 paper Bibles. And I didn’t read my Bible the day before I started writing this post. Therefore, it would seem that the absence of the Bible in my life came…
The 70/20/10 rule
Most good resources are taken from someone else (it’s not stealing if you give credit) and this is no exception. I took this from Coram Deo’s Bob Thune (https://bobthune.com/videos/the-role-of-a-gospel-community/) who in turn admitted to taking it from someone else. Look at the well-drawn picture that is the photo for this post. This road represents the…
Should we pray for persecution?
It doesn’t take a long time in the Sermon on the Mount before you realize that what Jesus says makes someone blessed is different from what most people think being blessed is. For instance, if you ask a cashier how she is doing and she responds, “I’m blessed” it is unlikely that you will in…
The most misunderstood wedding verse
I was a groomsman at a recent wedding and I was asked to give a devotional to the groom and the other groomsmen. What follows is a lightly edited (maybe sometimes heavily edited: speeches are always better on paper) version of that devotional. I have changed the bride and groom’s names to Susan and Ben…
The words you say and when you say them
One of my new favorite movies is “The Pianist.” It’s a 2002 Holocaust film which depicts the true story of a Jewish pianist in Nazi occupied Poland. Near the end of the film (spoilers) a German officer lets him hide in an empty attic and regularly supplies him with food. Part of the genius of…
The power of reviling and the response of the gospel
I am convinced that the single biggest thing that keeps Christians in the West from being open about their faith is the specter of being reviled. Reviling is when someone says something false and damaging against you. Maybe you want to tell someone that they are in sin, but you worry that they will say…
Ministry, Marriage, and the Delicate Balance of 1 Corinthians 7
1 Corinthians 7 is often put forward as the chapter on singleness. And while I do believe that it is the Bible’s most valuable chapter on that subject, how the Bible portrays singleness will–by implication– tell us a lot about what marriage is about. 1 Corinthians 7 states that singleness is better than marriage, because…
Love your church, whatever the size
After years of having a position of some church leadership, I’ve begun to get a feel for what people like and dislike about the church. But I have found that the things that I expected that people would dislike sometimes are not actually the biggest points of contention. For example, my church holds some culturally…
The Emptiness of Modern Life and the Three Ships of C.S. Lewis
The unexamined life often comes with a sort of frenzy. There was a time, around when I first started driving, that my car radio and CD player stopped working. It is impressed in my memory because I remember not being able to stand the quiet. In fact, I remember shouting as I drove just so…
Joshua Harris and Arranged Marriages
If you swim at all in the waters of evangelical subculture, you know who Joshua Harris is. Though he has since retracted much of what is in the book and has even left the faith, he is most famous for writing “I Kissed Dating Goodbye.” Published in 1997, the basic premise of the book was…
Your church will die, and other encouraging thoughts
Ecclesiastes is a hard book go through. It talks much about death. It does so because death is a reality that is hard to live with, but a reality, if embraced, that will make you wiser. A sampling: “For of the wise as of the fool there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the…
A desperate man in camel hair
John the Baptist was a lion of a man. He lived roughly, spoke passionately, and was killed because he wouldn’t compromise. But the most amazing part of his life was that his whole life revolved around making himself less and making much of Jesus. I named my son after him, and in the months leading…
News, context, and anxiety
Most people know the feeling of being anxious. A big event is in the future, you don’t really know what is going to happen, and you feel a stress crawling up into the edges of all your thoughts. At its worst, the anxiety paralyzes you and you search for something to distract you from thinking…
By Balloon or by Car
“And the weakness of All Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether…
“Joker” and the uneasiness of criminal sympathy
Joker The 2019 Joker film was an interesting animal, but what I think was more interesting was the reaction to it. I think one of the reasons (and there are a few) that people were opposed to the film is that it painted Arthur Fleck (the man who became the Joker) in a sympathetic light.…
The Beauty and Danger of January
January January is definitely in the running for my favorite month. There are two reasons for this. First, I always feel I can start over. For me, it is a time of seeing what I did badly last year and making plans to change. Secondly, there is time to actually implement those changes. The calendar…
My Favorite Books of 2020
The end of the year is a good time reflecting on what has shaped you, and few things have shaped me as profoundly as books. Here is a list of my top ten favorite books that I read (or listened to) in 2020. 1. The Abolition of Man – C.S. LewisIt is only someone like…
Defrost your heart
I have a love/hate relationship with large cuts of meat. I don’t like to keep raw meat in my fridge, because I always feel I’m on a timer before it goes bad. But, since I keep my fridge really (probably too) cold, It may take two or three days to thaw meat that I’ve pulled…
Why fundamentalists do well in missional churches
I’ve noticed that people with fundamentalist backgrounds tend to do well in missional churches. Now I know “fundamentalist” is a broad term and “missional” is a broad term, but I need to say something, right?Fundamentalism Fundamentalism was a movement that grew in part as a reaction to theological liberalism. Fundamentalists were a group of people…
The space between expectations and reality is called disappointment
Imagine Satan shows up before God and the council of angels and, just like the original story, wants to test Job. But in this particular permutation of the story, God says no. Don’t hurt his body, don’t hurt his children, don’t even hurt his livestock. So Satan pulls out plan B. “Can I lie to…
Create Dissonance
A few things stuck with me from the general education classes I took in college. One of these was the idea of “cognitive dissonance.” In psychology, this is the idea of having two inconsistent thoughts, neither of which you want to give up. Having these contradictory ideas in your head at the same time causes…
The command to like your neighbor
Francis Chan tells a story from when he was a young pastor. He was speaking to another, much older pastor who was telling Chan about the older pastor’s church’s Christmas play. The pastor said that they spent thousands of dollars and had hundreds of volunteers putting in 15 hours a week practicing. Then when Christmas…
What I would tell a 20-year-old me
In a little bit more than a month, I’ll be turning 30. I’m wrestling of the finality of the end of my 20’s. Looking on the last 10 years, I see some things I am really glad I did, some things that I really wish I had done, and the overwhelming grace of God in…
Learn to Fall
“In other words,” [Bree] continued, “you can’t ride. That’s a drawback. I’ll have to teach you as we go along. If you can’t ride, can you fall?” “I suppose anyone can fall,” said Shasta.“I mean can you fall and get up again without crying and mount again and fall again and yet not be afraid of…
Feel strongly and think deeply
I wish people would start applying the old story of the elephant and the blind men to more than just religion. This little story really does a poor job explaining religions and a pretty good job explaining a lot of other things. For the uninitiated: Three blind men stand next to an elephant. (For our…
Book review: Evangelism in a Skeptical World – Sam Chan
Christianity is true. Now, if that is the case, it makes sense that worldviews that deny Christianity are false. And since they are false, if you poke and prod them enough, you will find the (sometimes gaping) holes in them. Now there is a very unfortunate tendency among some Christians to find those holes, tell…
Wickedness and Self-Deception
One of the triumphs of postmodernism is that it has shown us that we are not rational, unbiased observers. The modern man used to think that he was something like a scientist in a lab coat, adding a few drops of red to a small pitcher of blue and “poof!” Purple. Turns out that the…
Theological Proportionality and Your Nose
“A man’s nose is a prominent feature in his face, but it is possible to make it so large that eyes and mouth and everything else are thrown into insignificance, and the drawing is a caricature and not a portrait: so certain important doctrines of the gospel can be so proclaimed in excess as to…
Good Enough
I’m going to say something controversial. When we do things, especially things in furtherance of the gospel, I think often we should settle with “good enough.” What do I mean? You haven’t prepared enough for a Bible study you are invited to lead? Lead it anyway. You are not super well versed on all the…
Our Business is People
You can’t measure how well or poorly you are doing something unless you have some sort of metric. Are you a good bricklayer? There is a few ways to measure that. Number of bricks laid, how strong the structure is, how honest your prices are, how well your clients like you. But here is the…
Poem: John’s Faults
In honor of Father’s day, I’m posting a poem that I wrote about my son John when he was only 2 months old. A lot has changed; unfortunately that change has been more drastic in him than in me. John’s Faults John, You’re a baby, and I love how you play and cooBut I admit,…
Racism and Bargain-Bin Philosophy
The best explanation that I’ve ever read of how philosophy affects our everyday life was written by author Rachel Jankovich. She writes, “Worldly philosophers and thinkers have always been something like the high-fashion designers who live in a sort of alternative reality. They make unbelievably stupid outfits for unbelievably tall and harsh looking people with…
When Your Ears Itch
“I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people…
Make Yourself Replaceable
When I was in college, I and a few friends started a campus ministry. We did small-group Bible studies and a series of evangelistic outreaches, ranging somewhere from wacky to somewhat decent. Overall, a good organization. I remember someone, years after I graduated, coming up to me and saying that they really appreciated the work…
Poem: Demas
Second Timothy was written near the end of Paul’s life, and in a lot of ways it is a really sad book. Paul talks about people abandoning him, one of them was Demas. The Bible doesn’t tell us a lot about this man, but Paul does write, “…Demas, in love with this present world, has…
The Wild Equilibrium of Christianity
Many people like heresy because they think it is new. They say that standard, orthodox Christianity is dry and boring, while a new take on Christianity is wild and exciting. G.K. Chesterton would laugh at those people. Chesterton compared true Christianity with a man holding on to dear life behind galloping horses, swaying to the…
What Else is Real
Background My son is almost 2, so I traffick pretty heavily in children’s books. One of my favorites, “Why do we say goodnight,” is by Champ Thornton. Especially for being a children’s book, this book has some really solid truth. I think his most helpful contribution is how he portrays the interplay between emotions and…
The Severe Mercy of the Fall
The Common Narrative The longer that I am a Christian, the more I realize how nuanced suffering is. Take the story of the Fall of Man. In the first three chapters of Genesis, God creates the world. Man is placed in the perfect Garden of Eden to work and cultivate. There is a rule, however,…
Rugged Good Works
“Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may…
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Another Small Stone 