True Christianity is a fight. Anyone who offers you a Christianity without tears is not giving you good money; it’s counterfeit. Anybody who says, “If you receive the baptism of the Spirit, your problems are over; if you receive the voice of assuranc...
We’re looking at the life of Jesus. Not at his words and teachings, but at his deeds and his life—the things that happened to him and the things he did. The birth of Christ has one wonderfully big word attached to it: the word “incarnation.” The bir...
We all want peace, contentment, groundedness. And Jesus says, he will give us his peace. But he doesn’t just zap us with it. He says it comes through learning who he is. John 16 is the end of the training course Jesus gives his disciples. It’s just b...
There’s a whole field now called happiness studies—whole departments in academia are dedicated to happiness studies. And of all the things I’ve read, none of them are as nuanced as what Jesus says. Jesus says one of the main resources his disciples n...
When you’re about to die, you don’t make small talk. You talk about the most crucial, important things. And on the night before Jesus is about to die, he’s talking about the Holy Spirit. Why is Jesus so constantly talking about the Holy Spirit? I th...
There’s no more important issue, spiritually, for people than the question of innocent suffering. We don’t struggle much with the suffering that comes to people who’ve brought it on themselves. The real problem is innocent suffering. We’re looking a...
Exodus 33-34 remarkably depicts, in the most concrete way, how to find God. And not only how to find God, but how to find him when you’ve lost him. The Bible often talks about our relationship with God as if it’s fire. It comes down into our lives....
When we hear the word “sin,” we think we know what it means. But we don’t—not really. If we don’t understand sin, then Christianity makes no sense. But even more so, if we don’t understand sin, then the knowledge of God’s love and grace won’t really...
It takes tremendous courage to leave the land you’ve always lived in and permanently move to another land. People don’t usually do it unless they expect a better life. In the book of Ruth, we have the story of two immigrant women—Naomi and Ruth—who f...
Forget the heroes. These days, we want authenticity. We want personal vision. We’ve done away with hero worship. In the story of Samson, we see that the Bible doesn’t give us hero worship, but it also doesn’t give us hero hatred or deconstruction. S...
If you don’t yet, you will soon sense an acute need for wisdom. You’ll take a job you never should’ve taken, hire somebody you never should’ve hired, date somebody you never should’ve dated. Often, the older you get, the more you worry. Because the o...
The story of Joseph tells us something awfully basic, and yet probably all of us will recognize that the problems in our lives are due to a lack of orientation to this thing that’s so basic. This story tells us God is a God both of truth and of love—...
How do we find God? We’re looking now to, I think, probably the strangest of all narrative accounts in the Bible of a human being encountering God. It’s a long story. All of Jacob’s life, he’s been wrestling with his twin brother, Esau. He’s been awa...
We’re looking at laughter and bitterness by looking at a particular experience, and that is a woman laughing because her only child has been born. It’s an incredibly old woman we have here: a woman who’s 90 years old. We’re told in the Bible that thi...
A lot of people say Ecclesiastes is the greatest book of the Bible. But I can almost guarantee none of them felt that way the first time they read it. Because when you first read Ecclesiastes, what you’re struck with is a professor in absolute despai...
