May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy. (Colossians 1:11)

Strength is the right word. The apostle Paul prayed for the church at Colossae, that they would be “strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience” (Colossians 1:11). Patience is the evidence of an inner strength.

Impatient people are weak, and therefore dependent on external supports — like schedules that go just right and circumstances that support their fragile hearts. Their outbursts of oaths and threats and harsh criticisms of the culprits who crossed their plans do not sound weak. But that noise is all a camo…

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I read the Bible at the dinner table last night.

One of our daughters was laid out horizontally across her chair. Our son was crying, reaching for me to pick him up. And then our other daughter was doodling letters on the table with her sauce-glossed finger.

So I helped with that, and then I read. Galatians 3:26 says, simply, “for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.” Within a minute, I gave a short explanation, prayed, and closed with a hearty amen.

But before we transitioned to busing the table, our three-year-old spoke up. She claimed it was her turn to share and so, without reservation, I slid her the Bible and leaned in with full attention. She opened to some rando…

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Jesus endured the cross for the joy that was set before him. He knew his mission.

The evangelist Luke captures Jesus’s relentless journey by telling us that “he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). Nothing would deter him.

In their new book, Why Cities Matter, Stephen Um and Justin Buzzard discuss this significance of Jesus coming into the city of Jerusalem. Cities, they explain, play a key role throughout the biblical storyline. The end-time vision of the new world is focused on a city, the new Jerusalem. This is at the heart of our hope in the Book of Hebrews (Hebrews 11:10, 16; 12:22). And as Um and Buzzard contend, the only reason this lasting city can be our hopeful end is be…

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Have you ever noticed how hard it is to find an example of what we would call a “healthy family” in the Bible? It’s a lot easier to find families with a lot of sin and a lot of pain than to find families with a lot of harmony. For example, here’s just a sampling from Genesis:

• The first recorded husband and wife calamitously disobey God (Genesis 3).

• Their firstborn commits fratricide (Genesis 4:8).

• Sarah’s grief over infertility moves her to give her servant, Hagar, to Abraham as a concubine to bear a surrogate child (Genesis 16). When it happens, Sarah abuses Hagar in jealous anger. Abraham is passive in the whole affair.

• Lot, reluctant to leave sexually perverse Sodom, his home, has to be …

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It’s a beautiful thing when a single sentence reorients a soul for good. When one proposition proves potent enough to be life-changing for the better. Especially when it’s a short one.

For me, it was the spring of 2000 — perhaps you have your own story about being rocked by this shorty from Lewis. An older student, who was leading a Bible study on my freshman hall, picked Desiring God as our semester focus. I emphatically did not enjoy reading and had made my way through high school and my first year of college leaning heavily on Cliff’s Notes.

It was only a few pages into the book — if it hadn’t been near the front, I may never have found it — when John Piper uncorked this revolutionary l…

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