I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh. (Romans 9:2–3)

I just read Finish the Mission and was shaken by quotes like this, just as I was when I heard them at the Desiring God 2011 National Conference:

Hundreds of millions of men and women who have rebelled against the sovereign glory of God have never heard about the saving grace of God. So what does this mean for our lives? And what does this mean for the church?¹

And,

If there is any Scripture at all, this is true — that those who stubbornly refuse to submit to the gospel, and to love…

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He had… no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men. (Isaiah 53:2)

Are you feeling hopeful today? Take a look under the hood. How much of your hope is linked to some promise of a more attractive, prosperous, impressive future you — a you others will admire? Feeling discouraged? How much is linked to someone else’s disapproval?

The world has a gospel and preaches it all the time: be sexy, successful, or smart and you will be saved. What you will be saved to are the heavens of others’ esteem, desire and envy — and the various perks that usually come with it. What you will be saved from are the hells of others’ rejection and indifference — and the various undesi…

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 Life is Christ. (Philippians 1:21)

One of the great hoaxes of our time is that we’ve learned to worship posers. American heroes are mainly entertainers. Our heroes don’t have to do anything particularly great, they just need to look and sound great. Lewis was right in more ways than one: “we are far too easily pleased.”

My beef is not with skillful entertainers as such. Working hard to become skillful with the gifts God gave us is a good thing, if used for redemptive purposes.

My beef is with us. We’ve made them cultural gods. They dominate our t-shirts, bedroom walls, Facebook pages, and living room plasma screens. We listen to them in our ear buds and Twitter feeds. And we bestow o…

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“The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet… they are soon gone, and we fly away” (Psalm 90:10).

My children begin school this week. The summer is passing us by and we’re all groaning a bit. It went so fast.

I turned 47 this summer. 47? I remember my Dad turning 47. How’d I get here so soon? My oldest child turned 16 this summer. My second child turns 14 this week. But they were just toddlers! We were just trying to figure out kindergarten options for them, weren’t we?

Life is a vapor. Even if we live to old age our lives “are soon gone” (Psalm 90:10). But most people either desperately try to grab as much life as they can by pursuing passing things, …

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Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. (John 14:1)

Discouragement is a temptation “common to man” (1 Corinthians 10:13). And in dealing with it sometimes we need tenderness and other times we need toughness. But either way discouragement is not to be tolerated or wallowed in. It’s to be fought.

If we linger in discouragement it can be costly. Its sense of defeat and hopelessness saps us of energy and vision. It can consume a lot of time. It can keep us from doing what we need to do because we don’t want to face it. And it can even be contagious, weakening others’ faith.

When we feel discouraged we want comfort, which is right to feel. But the comforts…

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At the root of insecurity — the anxiety over how others think of us — is pride. This pride is an excessive desire for others to see us as impressive and admirable. Insecurity is the fear that they won’t, but instead they will see us as deficient. As King Saul¹ shows us, it’s a dangerous fear because insecurity can lead to great disobedience.

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Samuel’s heart was broken and heavy as he neared Saul’s camp at Gilgal. Israel’s first king had failed so soon and so seriously.

And Samuel was tired. He’d been up all night prayerfully mourning the Lord’s words, “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments.”

And he was…

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I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord (Philippians 3:8).

One thing is for sure: Christianity is not for stoics. The Bible is the most wild, romantic book ever written. The New Testament is no cool, reasoned analysis of Jesus's system of thought. It is a passionate book written by people who were ravished by Jesus, who felt and said ardent things like Philippians 3:8.

You know what the world calls statements like Paul's? Religious extremism. Fanaticism. You "count everything as loss"? Sounds dangerous. Have you thought about seeing a therapist?

But the world is full of such talk when it comes to romantic love. We expect lovers' l…

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We impoverish ourselves by not lingering more. Whipping from one thing to the next does not make for a rich, memorable life. Understanding and wonder and worship don’t typically result from doing or reading as many things as possible. It comes from focus and contemplation and rumination. For most of us the wise choice is to go deep, not broad.

When you stop to examine, to search through, to figure out, to study, you begin to see things. You begin to realize how substantial and profound seemingly simple things really are. Understanding emerges and you begin to make connections with other things. An appreciation of beauty you never noticed before grows. The scope of how little you really kno…

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Oh, that my people would listen to me. (Psalm 81:13)

“Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information.”¹ I’ll bet you’re finding that difficult to do, aren’t you — paying attention? As you read this are other flies of information buzzing around your head?

Ever since sin clouded the human mind with disparate impulses and voices, paying attention, particularly to the right things, has been hard. But it’s never been harder than it is now.

Humans “create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003.”² The average adult in the West wades through the equivalent of 174 newspapers worth of information per day.³

The sheer amou…

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“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3).

If you have been born again, the greatest miracle that you can ever experience in this life has happened to you. No healing, no deliverance, no prophecy, no Philip-like translation in the spirit (Acts 8:39-40), no George Müller-like financial provision arriving at the exact moment you need it comes close. It’s greater than what Lazarus experienced. What happened to Lazarus was a pointer, a parable for what happened to you.

That’s why when the seventy-two disciples returned from their tours of ministry and excitedly recounted the signs and wonders that occurred, including the commandi…

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