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The Cool God Is a Puny God
Americans, and most Westerners, live in cultures governed by the god called “Cool.”Cool doesn’t have a temple we can see or visit, but his images and shrines are everywhere. Cool is a god that we...
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I Do Not Aspire to Be a “Regular Guy”
When my soul is hungry for deep help from God; when I am blank before the word of God, and ache for someone to show me the greatness and glory of Christ; when I feel a longing for heaven, and desire a...
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Kitchen Grace and the Great Commission
There is a story about trying to bring the gospel to indigenous people in Indonesia. Every day the missionaries came into the village and tried to gather the people to preach the good news. Not many of...
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Manage Your Time for the Mission of Love
You are always on the clock. There’s no avoiding it.Every human, in every place on the planet, whatever the culture, is subject to the incessant passing of time. The sands are always falling. No matter...
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The Surpassing (Not Bypassing) Authority of Jesus
God is on a mission to redeem the world. We know this is true because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As believers, on one hand, we relate to this mission because we are those God...
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Orienting on Homosexual Orientation
I remember a particular conversation I had one evening with a good friend about my struggle with same-sex attraction (SSA). He asked me, “Attractions are messy, complicated realities. How do you deal...
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That Angry Gentleman at the Restaurant
The man’s facial expression betrayed any attempt he might have put forward to hide his frustration. I could tell when I caught a glimpse of him. My family was sitting behind his table at a local...
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When God Seems Silent
God can be maddeningly hard to get. When God says that his ways are not our ways, he really means it (Isaiah 55:8).We have these encounters with him where he breaks into our lives with power and...
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Six Ways Your Phone Is Changing You
Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Macworld Expo 2007, and I got my first one a year later. I can’t remember life without it.For seven years an iPhone has always been within my reach, there to wake me...
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Satan Disarmed, Sin Forgiven, Soul Alive
Since Satan still “prowls around like a roaring lion” (1 Peter 5:8), in what sense is he disarmed (Colossians 2:15) or nullified (Hebrews 2:14), or bound (Mark 3:27)?One of the most beautiful passages...
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You Can’t Buy Happiness
Restlessness isn’t the real problem.Cultures that crack the whip for more bricks, like the ancient Egypt who held Israel captive, are in it for more than the work. The ceaseless labor — the lack of...
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We Must Learn to Taste
God doesn’t play fair.Much to my parents’ concern, I hadn’t been to church for a long time. And yet here I was, in my first term at university, sliding into a pew at St Ebbe’s Church in Oxford.This, I...
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A First Glimpse at ‘Look at the Book’
This is not the launch of Look at the Book. It’s a preview. It’s a ten-minute demonstration of the kind of thing I will be doing at our National Conference this September, and then with several texts...
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Four Lessons in Fruitful Time-Management
Acts of love don’t just happen.At times we may experience the power of the Spirit in such a way that some good deed seems to flow naturally from our heart, through our hands, to the benefit of others....
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Keep Praying That Prayer
My six-year-old daughter prays for her teddy bear to talk, and I haven’t told her to stop.Do I think God will answer her prayer? No, I do not. But always getting exactly what we ask is not the point of...
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Autocorrect and Indwelling Sin
It’s a simple formula: overconfidence in phone-typing ability leads to an increased typing speed, which then leads to typos processed by a confused autocorrect program that turns “I’ll be praying for...
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J.I. Packer on Living to the End “Flat Out”
This week J.I. Packer turned 88. He has written a book on aging. It’s titled, Finishing Our Course with Joy: Guidance from God for Engaging with Our Aging. At age 68 I found it riveting. It made me...
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Danger: Ministry Idolatry
It may be the sneakiest form of idolatry — and the deadliest.The deceptive thing about idolatry in general is that it is not just the overt worship of graven images, but anything that stands in God’s...
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Worship in the Dark
“Psalm 88 isn’t like the others,” a friend recently remarked. “Most psalms end on the high note of hope, but not Psalm 88.”It’s true. This psalm is different. The concluding words aren’t what we’d...
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What Is a Disciple?
When Jesus speaks we listen.That makes sense, right? Jesus is the one to whom all authority in heaven and earth has been given (Matthew 28:18). Jesus is the one of whom it will be said, forever,...
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