Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger. (James 1:19)

Listen. Wait. Respond.

How many of our conflicts would dissolve or never even materialize if we:

• Listened to really understand a person’s concern or complaint,
• Waited... till our typically wrong initial impulse passed, till we’ve prayed, till we’ve asked clarifying questions,
• And then responded with patience, graciousness, honesty, clarity, and, if possible, brevity?

Full disclosure: I’m writing mainly to myself here. But if you, like me, tend to be slow to hear, quick to speak, and quick to impatience, come and exhort yourself with me.

Listen. A quickness to listen i…

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Peter watched Jesus make his way toward him, washing the feet of other disciples.

It had already been a confusing Passover. Jesus had been unusually burdened, close to tears all day. The atmosphere during the meal was charged with ominous anticipation.

Peter had grown used to Jesus doing and saying unpredictable things. But what Jesus was doing now was wrong. He was the last person in the room who should be washing feet.

All of Peter’s life he had been taught that feet were dishonorable members of the body. They were usually dirty, frequently smelly, and among the most likely members to come in contact with things that the Law declared unclean.

Outside of immediate family…

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Fast approaching is a cultural moment we should not miss for trying to help people see Jesus Christ.

America may be post-Christian, but Christmas is graciously stubborn. There it is in December, immovable. God has mercifully ordained that much of our economy depends on a cultural remembrance of the birth of the Messiah. God employs irony by using the power of unrighteous mammon to force pagan Westerners to look at Jesus. Yes, he may be obscured by a lot of godless glitz and noise. But God has not been fully eclipsed by gaud.

It is the only time of the year you will walk through a mall and hear “Hallelujah! For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!” or “Joy to the world! The Lord has come! …

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The 57th U.S. presidential election is bearing down hard on us. Well-funded propaganda warships are shelling us from every media outlet. Dire consequences are prophesied if the wrong vision for America is elected to power.

But here’s something that you haven’t seen on any yard sign, heard in any debate, or read in any party platform:

If we do not join God in advancing his aim for the universe, then we waste our lives and we oppose our Creator.

That’s a perspective-adjuster, isn’t it? Here’s another one:

All understandings of all things that do not take God into consideration are superficial understandings, since they do not reckon with… what really matters in the universe, namely Go…

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I forget the gospel. It’s one of the most maddening things about living with a truth-distorting sin nature. Let me give you a recent example.

A few weeks ago I said to my wife, “I’m feeling gospel fatigue. I’m tired of hearing ‘gospel’ in just about everything.” She looked at me funny. I explained that I was probably just feeling jaded by the commercialization of the gospel or how it seems like a trendy bandwagon. She didn’t buy that. She knows me well. She suggested I probe deeper. She was right, as usual.

So I asked myself what this “gospel fatigue” is. Am I really weary of hearing that Jesus became sin for me (2 Corinthians 5:21), cancelled my full sin debt (Colossians 2:14), and has…

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“He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 53:3)

Sometimes we feel alone in the world. Jesus understands this feeling. In a very human sense, he was alone.  

Imagine what living in this world was like for Jesus. He was without sin (Hebrews 4:15). That might sound like a pleasant problem to deal with. I don’t think so. I think it was tormenting. Peter described sinful Lot’s experience in Sodom as being tormented day after day by the “lawless deeds that he saw and heard” (2 Peter 2:8). How much worse was it for sinless Jesus living in a world of sin?

Imagine what his childhood was like. He would have been odd, sticking out morally like a…

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Jesus died for me. What a treasure I must be!

I can think of a number of times over the years when I’ve heard people say something like this. And typically they were people I knew read the Bible frequently. But this idea isn’t in the Bible. Jesus didn’t die to purchase treasures. He died to ransom (Mark 10:45) enemies (Romans 5:10). We’re not the Pearl of Great Price (Matthew 13:46); Jesus is. So where did they get this idea from?

Faulty lenses.

Somewhere along the way their subjective experience and/or bad teaching caused them to look at the cross, see Jesus hanging on the cursed tree, and see a statement of their self-worth rather than amazing grace that saves wretches.

Lenses ar…

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When it comes to God, you must always keep your eyes open. If you don’t pay attention you’ll miss jaw-dropping glory.

Take the book of Esther, for example. If you’re not careful, you’ll only see a Hollywood-like story of a beautiful young orphan girl who against all odds becomes queen of Persia and, with a little help, recognizes her moment of destiny and courageously faces down a Persian Hitler.

And you would miss the real story.

The real story is not Esther’s inspiring courage or her beauty or Mordecai’s sage wisdom. This story is about what’s really going on behind the machinations of power.

Haman thinks he’s taking super-sized revenge on Mordecai for dissing him by orchestrati…

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Human history swings on the hinge of a Palestinian Jew. They can call it “Common Era” if they wish, but every event known to man is recorded as occurring (approximately) before or after the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

And no single event in recorded history is more influential than his execution. Because of Jesus’s death nearly 2,000 years ago, over 2 billion people now call themselves Christians. Most statisticians agree that over 100,000 are killed every year because they take that name.

Why? Why is Jesus’s death so influential? And why are a million people killed in a decade because Jesus was killed?

Why is precisely the right question to ask. Everything hangs on why Jesus died.

…

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“Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.” (Exodus 33:11)

“[Jethro said to Moses,] What you are doing is not good… Now obey my voice; I will give you advice, and God be with you”… So Moses listened to the voice of his father-in-law and did all that he had said. (Exodus 18:17, 19, 24)

Have you ever wondered why God, who gave Moses such detailed verbal instructions about things like the construction of the tabernacle and the keeping of the law, never instructed Moses on how he was to perform his role as judge in Israel? Instead he allowed Moses to struggle under an overbearing workload for a while and finally sends Jethro, Moses’s father-in-law, to b…

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