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When Grace Is in the Pulpit
Few practices will energize and affect your Christian life as much as sitting attentively under faithful preaching.While corporate worship as a whole may be the single most important means of God’s...
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An Open Letter to My Friends Struggling with Eating Disorders
Dear friend,I want to take you back 20 years, to when I am thirteen years old.I am a pastor’s kid standing in a hospital room with clumps of hair in my hand.My nails are splintered, and you can see the...
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Eight Traits of Good Teaching
It’s a very short book on spiritual leadership — just a booklet, really — but the walls of this small cave are lined with gold. You won’t even need a pickax to pluck off a nugget.In The Marks of a...
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The Deepest Desire of the Christian Heart
Since I was 22 years old all my Bible reading, all my journaling, all my counseling and writing and preaching and thinking, has circled back to this: “Hallowed be your name.” I have come back again and...
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Help for Those Fighting or Grieving a Suicide
Robin Williams’s alleged suicide has sent shock waves through the world.Williams was a man bursting with manic energy, an out-sized personality, prodigious dramatic talent, and a completely unique...
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Talking About “Man-Boys”
She was a single Christian friend (totally just friends), venting her frustration about immature men. It was casual, because that kind of venting is common. It was over coffee. It cut deep.“Christian...
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Do You Love Your Enemies Enough to Hate Them?
Jesus said to love our enemies.That is what he said, as Matthew recounts his words from the Sermon on the Mount:“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But...
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When God Messes with Your Life Plan
Creating life plans is big business these days. For a sum of money, you can hire a Life Coach (Life Guru, Life Master, Life Sensei, whatever it’s called), and they will then help you construct a master...
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Three Steps to Stop Wasting Your Life
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. (Proverbs 3:5–6)Every day, you and I will be...
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True Grit
“The way is hard that leads to life.” (Matthew 7:14)“By your endurance you will gain your lives.” (Luke 21:19)We humans are always seeking to discover new keys to success. But nowadays we’re hearing...
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Men, Are You Settled on the Issue of Abortion?
This is a question for men: Are you settled on the issue of abortion?I mean really settled, head and heart together, such that you would sacrificially love both the mother and the unborn child if your...
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Pray for Ferguson
It’s hard to know how to respond to everything we see in the 24-hour news cycle. News, commentaries, social media, and television report hundreds of injustices (and thousands still go unreported). How...
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Do We Live in the Matrix?
The Matrix (1999) is a man-against-the-machines movie about the enslavement of the human race. When we enter the story, human brains have been hardwired together into one supercomputer, forming a...
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Our Wonderful and Weighty Responsibility
Most churches devote around 20–30 minutes each weekend to a time of congregational singing. During this time, the worship pastor is given the sacred trust of communicating to those in his church the...
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The Sin in Our Cynicism
Cynicism is a problem.Maybe it’s not explicitly on your radar, but you’re sure to have felt its force. Cynicism is that sneering bitterness toward all things true and deep. It’s the subtle contempt...
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Make Your Mouth a Fountain of Life
The Bible tells us “death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21). That means a lot is at stake in what we say today. And in literate societies like ours, tongues include hands that...
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Teach Believers What Happened to Them in Conversion
Everyone who is converted to Christ is converted through partial knowledge. Real knowledge, to be sure — otherwise, there would be no true conversion — put partial, nevertheless.This is not surprising,...
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The Essential Secret of Preaching
In John Stott’s classic work Between Two Worlds, he writes:In a world which seems either unwilling or unable to listen, how can we be persuaded to go on preaching, and learn to do so effectively? The...
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College Doesn’t Change Your Heart, It Reveals It
Every summer the same thing happens to my inbox. I open it to find a steady stream of emails from concerned parents, youth pastors, and older siblings, asking me to check in on so and so when they get...
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Sanctified Name-Dropping
In Jesus’s name, amen.We often tack this phrase onto the end of our prayers out of habit. Perhaps because of our Christian conditioning, or maybe because it signals that we’ve finished our turn in...
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