All of life is a battle between two selves, but there’s a war before you become a Christian that’s different from the war that happens after you become a Christian. When you become a Christian, you don’t move from warfare to peace. You move from a b...
In Psalm 73, Asaph is mad at God. He’s been living right, but everything is going wrong. Yet all kinds of abusive people are having great lives. Life seems unjust. Asaph’s just about to chuck his faith. Yet at the end, he’s able to say in his pain, “...
A lot of people are mad at God. People who believe. People who don’t believe. And people who don’t know what they believe. And in Psalm 73, we see Asaph get mad at the way God seems to be mishandling the world. Asaph has been living a self-controlled...
Jesus’ teaching about money here is triggered by an event: a Pharisee gets upset that Jesus didn’t wash his hands before he ate his food. The ceremonial washings of the Old Testament were visual aids for the idea that you need to approach God with a...
Everyone points to a different reason for why the city has problems. The futurologists will say, “Technology has doomed the city. We don’t need to live in proximity anymore.” The liberals will say, “Racism has doomed the city.” The conservatives will...
Guilt is a lot like an iceberg. You don’t see much above the surface, but if you really look, you’ll see it’s under everything. So how do you deal with a guilty conscience? In Psalm 51, David has been plunged—through the shock of recognizing the mag...
Of the articles and books I survey on worry or anxiety, they almost always say, “The things you’re worried about may never happen. So don’t think about them.” But in Psalm 27, David does the opposite: he visualizes the worst things that can happen. W...
A Newsweek cover story said that after a 30-year spree, our entire society is waking up with a monstrous hangover, facing a values vacuum. It said that we realize unlimited personal freedom is not the way to build a society, but now we face the quest...
When it comes to building up identity and self-esteem, I’m afraid Americans are very pragmatic—and our pragmatism gets to us. Our books and articles say if you want self-esteem, you should lose weight, change your friends, switch your career, and so...
A fool can be brilliant and a fool can be stupid. Foolishness is not a function of your intelligence. Foolishness is a function of how you use your intelligence. The Bible says every human being is born with a heavy streak of foolishness. It’s like...
There is a thirst in the human heart that will not be denied. It cannot be denied. That thirst is for transcendence. Transcendence is intimacy with the infinite. Psalm 63 is about the search for transcendence. It says there is irreducible knowledge,...
A plant without roots is at best a tumbleweed. Is a tumbleweed freer than an oak tree? Yeah, it’s free to be blown about forever. There is what the Bible calls a rootlessness and a weightlessness about our society right now. Many of the problems you...
Have you in this modern world learned how to become happy and stay happy? I hope you don’t think that’s a trivial question. Because if you read the psychology books, the urban planning books, the biochemistry books, the political science books, they’...
Jesus, in Matthew 18, uses a word for conversion that means to turn completely around and face in a whole new direction. That’s a perfect image of what Christian conversion really is. Christian conversion is a radical inner transformation. But it’s...
Christianity was originally never understood as a set of teachings that one took on. Christianity was a power that took you up. It completely turned you inside out, transformed you from the inside. The classic example is the conversion of Paul. Paul...
