The racial world I grew up in and the one we live in today are amazingly different. Racism remains in many forms in America and around the world. But in the days of my youth the segregation was almost absolute and the defense of it was overt and ugly, without shame.

• In 1954, seventeen states required segregated public schools (ABW, 99);
• In 1956, 85% of all white southerners rejected the statement, “White students and Negro students should go to the same schools”;
• 73% said that there should be “separate sections for Negros on streetcars and buses”;
• 62% did not want a Negro “with the same income and education” as them to move into their neighborhood (ABW, 144);
• In 1963, 82% of all w…

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The poem I’m about to read is called “Pilgrim’s Conflict with Sloth.” It brings together three things that I am facing and loving: one is poetry, another is work, and another is this transition in my life that some people call retirement, as I step away from being the senior pastor of Bethlehem. So I set myself to ask how I feel about stopping. Am I stopping? Am I going to keep working? What’s the right view of work? Why do I love poetry so much?

All of this came together in a poem in which I encounter sloth as an enemy on the road. And the way it works out is that the poem is my wrestling. It’s the way my mind works. I wrestle with: Who am I? Am I a workaholic? Am I not? What’s a right th…

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In December, 1744, Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon foreshadowing The End for Which God Created the World, which he completed eleven years later, three years before he died. It’s title was “Approaching the End of God’s Grand Design.”

It is the kind of sermon that draws me back again and again to Edwards to rescue me from the spiritual strangle hold of small things. It’s this kind of seeing that makes the seedbed of Big-God Theology and Big-God Preaching. You can read it here. If there was ever a day we needed Big-God Preaching it is now.

He states the Doctrine: There is a time coming when God's grand design in all his various works and dispensations from age to age will be completed and …

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Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. ⁸ For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. ⁹ Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? ¹⁰ Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? ¹¹ If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! ¹² “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 7:7–12)

This has proved, in my experience, to be one of the most motivating passage…

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From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides you, who acts for those who wait for him. (Isaiah 64:4)

This verse took on a powerful new meaning for me in my early twenties when I was discovering new dimensions of the greatness of God. This discovery was coming in the form of teaching that God could not be served, but that he shows his power by serving us.

This was mindboggling to me. I had always taken for granted that the greatness of God consisted in his right to demand service. And, of course, in one sense, that’s true. After all, didn’t Paul call himself a “servant of the Lord” over and over?

But what about Acts 17:25? “God is not served by human …

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Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. (Isaiah 41:10)

There is no verse in the Bible I have used more often to strengthen my hand for a frightening task. It is my default promise. It is the whir of the gears of my brain when they are in neutral. It has served me for decades like no other verse. It has strengthened me for traveling to strange places, speaking a foreign language, taking doctoral exams, interviewing for jobs, preaching to big crowds, facing cancer surgery, making undesired phone calls, and saying I’m sorry.

It is the most common first T in APTAT — my way of walkin…

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“God is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them.” That was one of our most widely spread tweets in 2012. So we want to say it again for 2013 and make this promise even more solid.

Not only may you see a tiny fraction of what God is doing in your life; the part you do see may make no sense to you.

• You may find yourself in prison, and God may be advancing the gospel among the guards, and making the free brothers bold. (Philippians 1:12–14)
• You may find yourself with a painful thorn, and God may be making the power of Christ more beautiful in weakness. (2 Corinthians 12:8)
• You may find yourself with a dead brother that Jesus could have healed, and …

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Noël’s birthday was on December 27. My last day as Lead Pastor for Preaching is today, December 31.

I’ve been in this role at Bethlehem for thirty-two and a half years today. Remarkably, Noël turned 65 and has thus spent exactly half her life at Bethlehem (32.5 years).

This prompted a poem for her birthday. It is part of the overflow of thankfulness I am feeling these days. God has been good to me. In my wife. In my church. Very good.

                    Not Halves

The happy day that you were born, was I
In some real way born too? Since we would mesh
One day in marriage, was I already you? Was my
Life yours and your life mine? Was our one flesh
     Already made, if only in …

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Treat this year-end like the end of your life. Then be ecstatic that you get to start a new life tomorrow.

For some of us, not only is the year ending, but so is a life-ministry. When the clock tolls midnight I will hand off the senior leadership of Bethlehem to Jason Meyer (with overwhelming gratefulness for God’s goodness). I’ll be on staff until March 31, 2013, but effectively, this season of leadership is over.

So not only do I get to start a new life tomorrow (as it were), I get to start a new era of life (as it is).

Here is what I am preaching to myself, and to you too, if you want to listen in: Long, effective ministries and lives can end very badly. Don’t let it happen. Finish in …

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As this year ends, the question I am asking is: Where was God when so many good things happened this past year?

How can God be a God of justice, yet allow so much good to happen to people who dishonor him by disbelieving in him, or giving lip service to his existence, or paying no more attention to him than the carpet in their den, or rejecting the kingship of his Son, or scorning his word, or preferring a hundred pleasures before him?

How can God be righteous and do so much good to us who are so unrighteous?

Where was God in 2012?

• Where was God when nine million planes landed safely in the United States?
• Where was God when the world revolved around the sun so accurately that it …

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