A far greater challenge than understanding the hard-to-understand parts of the Bible is doing the easy-to-understand parts. When Jesus says the greatest commandment is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart,” the difficult task is not understanding what…
Cliché describes a word or phrase that is used so often it’s practically meaningless. A danger all Christians must fight off is to make cliché God’s vocabulary. A prime example is the word “faith.” To ask for a definition of…
The final scene of John’s gospel narrates the call for Peter to take up the tasks of ministering to Jesus’s people and being martyred for the glory of God. Yet instead of embracing his lot, Peter concerns himself with John’s.…
One of the dumbest and most consistent arguments in the gospels is over who the greatest is in Jesus’s kingdom. The answer Jesus gives, that they must become like children, reveals the silliness of the argument and gets at the…
God did not intend for us to become Christians and then go live on a deserted island. From the beginning God’s plan was that his people band together with the rest of his children, to share life, and bear each…
The parable of the sower taught us that just as different soils receive the same seed in different ways, so different hearts receive the gospel in different ways. That’s exactly what happens in Mark 7, where three different groups of…