Too Late

At concourse G, gate seventeen,
     My sweat and panting pleas
That obstacles were unforeseen 
     May have been fantasies 
For all they cared of where I’d been.
    The door was locked within.
“I waited at another gate,”
     I pled. They said, “Too late.”

I wait, and weary, fall—hurled back
    Through sluggish centuries—
Asleep. The roof of my poor shack
    Unrhythmic’ly taps. These
Drops of rain suddenly unite
    In weeks of raging night.
I linger, doubting. Then flail straight
    To Noah’s ark. Too late.

Again I dream. Esau. I scratch
    My hairy arms and smell
The wildness in my clothes, and snatch
    At ev’ry hollow shell
Of happiness—in vain—and gr…

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Hey you, rich young ruler…

Maybe you’re old for pro football, but you’re young to the rest of the world. And rich. You’ve negotiated salary-cap-friendly deals with your team, but that still has you at a guaranteed $33 million over the next five seasons.

And as much as anyone in this generation, you have ruled the NFL — three Super Bowl rings, twice Super Bowl MVP, twice league MVP, eight Pro Bowls, and five Super Bowl appearances in ten seasons. You hold the record for most touchdown passes in a single regular season, have the highest career playoff win total in NFL history, and are the first quarterback to lead a team to ten division titles. The Associated Press even named you Male Athlet…

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A few years ago, I became so disillusioned with how the word faith gets misused today that I wanted to propose we simply drop the word altogether, and perhaps use trust instead. But as I’ve aged, I’ve realized more and more just how wrong I was.

In reading Charles Spurgeon, one thing I’m constantly challenged by is his great, unembarrassed emphasis on faith. He even wrote a book called Chequebook of the Bank of Faith which is a devotional work based on the promises of God, and very worth the read.

For Spurgeon, faith lies at the very heart of the Christian life, and is not just something that we exercise at the beginning of our walk in order to become a Christian. For him, it is the very r…

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Pastor John recently tweeted, “Christian relationships have this as their goal: to help each other stay satisfied in God.” To learn more about how this gets worked out in practice, we asked him. In part, he said this:

It comes down to whether we taste and see that the Lord is good. I have said this to the church and I have said to pastors, and I have said to my wife. What I want from you, Noël, what I want from my staff, is for them to be happy in Jesus. The greatest ministry you can have to me is for you to enjoy Christ. And so I think when we turn that around and say, “Now how can I be the greatest blessing to the people around me?” The answer is: Get up in the morning. Go to the Word…

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[Download a print-version of “7 Things to Pray for My Children”]

Some years back a good friend shared with me seven Scripture texts that he and his wife prayed for their two daughters from the time they were infants. The girls are now grown. And it’s beautiful to see how God has (and still is) answering the faithful, specific prayers of faith-filled parents in the lives of these young, godly women.

I have frequently used these prayers when praying for my children too. And I commend them to you (see below).

But, of course, prayers are not magic spells. It’s not a matter of just saying the right things and our children will be blessed with success.

Some parents earnestly pray and their chi…

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The apostle Paul suffered. Did he ever.

He was imprisoned. He was beaten, often near death. He took 195 total lashes from his Jewish kinsmen on five occasions. He took three pummels with rods. He was once stoned — and then also shipwrecked three times. Then there are the endless dangers of travel in the first century, plus countless other experiences mentioned and unmentioned in the New Testament (2 Corinthians 11:21–33).

It doesn’t take long until we wonder how in the world he did it. How did he take so much pain? So much loss? How did he prepare for suffering?

The answer is in Philippians 3:7–8.

Counting Everything As Loss

In the 1992 sermon “Called to Suffer and Rejoice: That We Migh…

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Of the five Ask Pastor John podcasts released this week, none was more played than episode 37 — “A Theology of Prayer in 3 Minutes.” Pastor John set personal prayer into the context of God’s unfolding redemptive plan and the final victory of God.

He was responding to one man who had lost confidence in the power of prayer and was asking, Do my personal prayers make any difference?

Pastor John responded to the question with a short theology of prayer by explaining the significance of the golden censers (bowls) which hold the prayers of the saints (see Revelation 5:8, 8:3–4). In part, Pastor John explained the meaning of the passages like this —

Those bowls have two functions. They are…

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Spectacular glory awaits those who are joined to Jesus.

Not only will we see him in all his glory — which might be thrilling enough — but we will share in his glory as he transforms “our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). Rightly did C. S. Lewis observe that “the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship” (The Weight of Glory, 45).

This is the stunning doctrine of glorification. It’s almost too good to be true. Almost.

If the Bible didn’t make it plain, most of us would insist such a wonderful destiny could never be ours. But text after text tells the story of…

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A kid in Colorado with male genitals is prohibited from using the girls’ bathroom.

That’s the straightforward backstory on a recent piece from Donna Rose, a transsexual journalist writing her opinion for CNN. A Colorado school district has decided that a six-year-old child with male anatomy should use the boys’ bathroom at school, or a private one, Rose reports. Rose decries the school’s decision as discrimination because the child apparently has a deep sense of being a girl.

This six-year-old child, Rose writes,

knows she’s a girl. She dresses as a girl. Her legal documents recognize her as a girl. Her parents accept her as a girl. On the playground, you would have difficulty identifying…

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Demas and Mark are contrasts in failure. One provides us a word of warning, the other a word of hope. And as people who stumble in many ways (James 3:2), we need both.

Demas

What happened to Demas? We don’t know. All we know is that some of the last words the Apostle Paul wrote before his Roman execution expressed a heartbreak:

Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica. (2 Timothy 4:10)

Maybe Demas feared being executed with Paul and fled to safety. Maybe he escaped to a place where he could let himself succumb to the siren song of immoral seduction. Or maybe he simply caved in to the allure of a comfortable, prosperous life in the urbane, cosmopoli…

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