St. Mark Houston

Anger is the giant we have all wrestled with since the first time we lost a game of Candyland. This week in our Giant Slayer series, we look at why anger is such a convincing liar, constantly telling us that whatever we feel and however we want to act on it is right and good.

Most of us fall into one of three patterns: we burn, we boil, or we burst. But James reminds us that the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God, and the real issue underneath is often one of identity. When our ego gets bruised, we forget who we are.

So what do we do instead? We walk through three practical steps: acknowledge the anger, ask what feeling lives underneath it, and apply the truth of Jesus to that deeper feeling. And the good news is that God has been patient with us, placing his righteous anger on Christ so that he could offer us nothing but mercy. Because he is slow to anger with us, we get to be slow to anger with the world.

There is a giant lurking in the lives of many deeply blessed people, and most of us never see it coming. Spiritual apathy does not announce itself. It just quietly settles in until the external routines are still there but the inner fire is completely gone.

We kick off our Giant Slayer series by looking at Jesus’s jarring words to the church at Laodicea, a wealthy, comfortable people whose faith had gone lukewarm, and whose water was famous for being nauseating. Sound familiar?

We dig into what feeds this giant, both the fortune of a blessed life and the futility of a chaotic one, and why Jesus is so aggressive about calling it out. The antidote is not more effort or better habits. It is repentance, a broken heart turned toward Jesus, who promises not just forgiveness but a renewed passion and a renewed sense of purpose. He is already knocking. The question is whether we will open the door.

What fear is holding you back from the thing you know God is calling you to do? Not the fear of snakes or public speaking, but the fear that keeps you from saying yes to the obedience right in front of you.

This week we sit with one of the most repeated commands in all of scripture, “fear not,” and discover that Jesus isn’t giving an unhelpful order. He’s making three promises packed into a single verse. You are a little flock, seen and held by a shepherd who doesn’t hold your weakness against you. You have a Father who is genuinely, giddily delighted in you. And the kingdom is not on layaway for later; its blessings are yours right now. When those three things take root, fear starts to lose its grip and freedom takes its place.

The opposite of fear isn’t peace. It’s freedom, the freedom to let go and dive into whatever people, problems, or possessions God is calling you to steward. What if you fly?

Healthy relationships require four things, and none of them are easy: honesty, repentance, forgiveness, and grace.

We close out our Ties That Bind series by looking at what it actually means to walk in truth with the people closest to you, not just saying the hard thing, but saying it in love, because truth without love is just harshness, and love without truth is just sentimentality. We dig into what real repentance looks like, including why confession can never come with a “but” attached, and what it means to be a quick, permanent forgiver even when the other person hasn’t asked for it.

And then there is grace, Luther’s call to put the best construction on everything, to assume the best about your spouse, your kids, your friends, before assuming the worst. The beautiful thing is that none of this is new. It is exactly what happens every week in worship: confession, absolution, grace freely given. God modeled the pattern for every healthy relationship first.

What if the most powerful thing you could do for your spouse is not fix them, but offer them mercy when they least deserve it?

This week in Ties That Bind, we explore one of the most countercultural ideas in scripture: marriage is not primarily about personal fulfillment but about mutual spiritual growth. God designed marriage to expose us, to strip away the carefully managed version of ourselves and reveal the raw, unfinished person underneath. And in that moment of exposure, a spouse has a unique calling to do what Jesus does for us every day: offer forgiveness anyway.

Drawing from Ephesians 5, we get practical about what that actually looks like, from the courage it takes to have hard conversations, to the specific words that breathe life into a husband or a wife at their lowest point. You are not your spouse's savior, but you are their launching pad, called to look past the rough marble and call forth the new creation that Jesus is chiseling out.

We live in a subscription culture where canceling is easy, but marriage was never designed to work that way. This week in our Ties That Bind series, we dig into what sets marriage apart from every other human relationship: it is not a contract but a covenant.

Drawing from Mark 10 and Genesis 2, we explore what it means for God to join two people together as one and why that union was never meant to be casually exited. Covenant love is defined by three things woven throughout scripture: steadfast love, unbreakable promise, and radical forgiveness. But the deeper revelation is that marriage is not the ultimate covenant. It is a picture pointing to something greater, the relationship between Christ and his church, a God who pursues, forgives, and refuses to give up on his people no matter how many times they wander.

Whether you are married, divorced, single, or somewhere in between, you are already in a covenant with the God of the universe, and that covenant is built on a never stopping, never giving up, always and forever love.

We all walk into our most important relationships carrying a giant box of expectations, and inside that box is something more vulnerable than a wish list. It is our wounds, our fears, and the things that make us feel less than.

This week we kick off a new series called Ties That Bind by looking honestly at what we bring into marriage and why it so often leads us to idolize our spouse and then demonize them when they inevitably fall short. The problem is a case of mistaken identity: we confuse oneness, the beautiful closeness God promises in marriage, with wholeness, which only God can give.

Through Colossians 2, we discover that in Jesus Christ you are already complete, not because you have earned it or healed yourself, but because his fullness has covered you. Healthy couples name their baggage, take responsibility for it, hand it to Jesus rather than their spouse, and grow the relationship not through more activity but through honest conversation and feasting on each other's words.

What does the blessed life actually look like? A recent survey found that most people point to careers, friendships, and experiences, but Psalm 1 offers a very different answer. The psalmist describes blessing not as a list of achievements but as a way of being: deeply rooted, perpetually fruitful, and unshakable even when everything around you is falling apart. The path there starts with two things: resisting the quiet drift away from God that all of us are prone to, and actively delighting in the truth of who God is.

But here is the twist most people miss. Psalm 1 is not ultimately about an ideal person you are supposed to become. It is pointing to one specific man, the man of Psalm 2, Jesus, the only one who ever perfectly lived out its vision. And the path to the blessed life is not trying harder to be that person. It is taking refuge in him, going all in on Jesus, and letting everything else grow from that.

When faith gets complicated, which it always does, where do we turn? This week we dig into one of scripture's most beloved and surprising stories: the prophet Elijah and a desperate widow on the edge of starvation in enemy territory. God sends his own prophet 100 miles from home into Baal's backyard, feeds him through unclean ravens, and then asks a widow with nothing left to give away her last meal.

The question this story raises is not whether God provides, because he clearly does. The question is whether we trust him when the way he provides makes no sense to us. We also sit with a harder challenge from Jesus himself: how do we respond when God's provision shows up for someone we didn't expect, or someone we think deserves it less than we do? Simple faith gives thanks for what God has given, rejoices when he gives the same to someone else, and keeps believing him even when things get complicated.

Nothing is off limits to a God passionate enough to chase down a pagan widow and feed her for three years straight.

We close out the Powering Down series with the fruit that grows when we actually stop: love. Not love as another obligation to add to an already impossible list, but love as the natural result of resting in Jesus and being filled by him.

We dig into John 15, Galatians 5, and 1 Corinthians 13 to discover that the primary fruit of a life rooted in Christ is love, and that love has a very specific shape. It chooses people over plans, presence over mere attendance, and patience over productivity. Love, it turns out, moves at about three miles an hour, the speed of walking, and you simply cannot do it at the pace most of us are living.

The question worth sitting with today is this: when all is said and done, what story do you want the people who know you to tell? Because if you want it to be a story of love, something about the speed has to change. And the good news is that Jesus has already won the freedom for you to slow down and choose the people.