I'd stuffed many a turkey before I really understood Thanksgiving. Oh sure, I knew we were supposed to be thankful, and once I became a Christian I knew who we were thanking. But the Thanksgiving story is more than just the tale of Pilgrims and Indians. ...
I have a friend who loves the Santa Claus tradition at Christmas. She and her husband go to great lengths to convince their children that Santa Claus exists. They make prints in the snow (including on their roof), leave a little pile of coal dust in ...
I think you're asking the wrong question here. The real question should be, "Why would you want to marry a non-Christian?"
God's vision for marriage is that of a place where a "culture of two" is created. Marriage is about sharing our lives, and ...
The news today is filled with terrible stories of violence and suffering. Violence against Christians, racial strife, airplanes crashed or missing, ongoing conflict in Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and several African countries—it’s no wonder ...
Most people don't talk much about mental illness. And because of this silence, many of us have the misconception that mental illness is something rare, something that happens to unusual people at the margins of society.
We couldn't be more ...
People pray on bended knee, opening their hearts to God, asking him for a myriad of things: healing of cancer, a job after all these months, a buyer for their house in a frozen market, the end of pain. Some prayers will be answered, and the recipients ...
Recently I have been drawn to the word deep as a descriptor when I speak of mature Christians. My earliest appreciation for the term came when I read a comment by Richard Foster, "The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent ...
Many Christians seem confused by the availability of so many different translations of the Bible. Christians of the past did not face so many choices. They had to learn the language of the King James, and if they could do it, why can't others? God ...
From countless pulpits every week we hear an implicit message that has wormed its way into our minds: we lack the key to unlocking the secrets of Scripture because we don't know the original languages they were written in. Sure, we have translations ...
My mother has schizophrenia. Her illness had a profound effect on our family, especially when I was a young teenager. Like many other families, we stayed pretty quiet about what we were experiencing. My dad was a pastor for 10 years, and after that we ...
Who is the Holy Spirit? He is, of course, God, and he helps us know where God is. But in talking about “where” God is, Christians are forced to retain two equal and (seemingly) opposing truths. We must with one hand cling to God’s transcendence—the ...
The book that best helped me understand why there are so many different denominations is Sacred Pathways by Gary Thomas. It was not written to explain denominations, but it does so in a backdoor way. In this book, Thomas explains how varied we are in ...