My life profoundly changed after becoming a father. After Daphne, Zane, and Scout were born, every decision in my mostly self-centered life suddenly included asking, “What about the kids?” And I soon developed a new worry: am I failing as a father? My wife and I take our vocations of motherhood and fatherhood very seriously. […]

Be gracious to me, God, according to your faithful love; according to your abundant compassion, blot out my rebellion (Psalm 51:1 CSB). Did you catch that? King David tells us that God is compassionate—not just somewhat compassionate but abundantly compassionate. God is that because He is gracious. That is exactly what you need when you’re […]

The new birth is permanent. It is irrevocable. Jesus said the believer “will not perish” and “will never die” (John 3:16; 11:28). If a believer could perish or die, then Jesus could not have made those promises because they would be false. By analogy, God warned Adam that he would die if he ate the […]

What’s the story about grace? I want to live a grace-filled life. I am burnt out by the legalism of society, where I’m constantly judged by how I measure up to hundreds of “little-l” laws, and consistently found wanting. Maybe you want to live a grace-filled life, too. If so, it may help to understand […]

One of my kids asked, “Do you even know what you’re doing?” Sometimes even my kids wonder about my very questionable parenting. I wish there were a rule book for how to be a good parent. Actually, there are! Many of them. Shelves of them in every bookstore, all promising to tell you the secret […]

Do you remember your spiritual birthday? Some people do. They’re blessed to know the exact day they first believed in Jesus for eternal life, and their salvation was settled forever. But other people have no memory of when that happened, which concerns them. They’ve heard some preachers say that if you don’t remember the moment […]

Rejoice in hope; be patient in affliction; be persistent in prayer (Romans 12:12). I heard a preacher say, “Pray as you can, not as you can’t.” He talked about how praying can be hard—not that it must be, but we often make it so. People and traditions can turn praying into a highly complex exercise, […]

Do you like being surprised? Do you like it when your life situation changes quickly and unexpectedly and the plans you carefully made suddenly fall through? I don’t! I enjoy small surprises, but not big ones. I like surprises that don’t really matter, don’t inconvenience me, and above all, don’t take away the control I […]

Why should you believe in God? The famous Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno once wrote: “It is the ardent longing for a God who guarantees the eternity of consciousness that leads us to believe in him” (Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, p. 186). Unamuno recognized that people long for eternal existence. Life is short. Painfully […]