Jesus came to freely share his sonship with us. He came to give us the same confidence he had as the eternally begotten and faithful Son of the Father. This is perhaps obvious regarding the testimony of Scriptures, but recently this reality has been striking more deeply into my heart, and what I see is [...]

The two battlefields that I will address this Lenten season are Fear and Restlessness. Both of these realities are pervasive in my soul, and as I look back on the whole of my adult life, I cannot think of a time when both of these enemies, in various forms, were not pulsing.

It’s the first day of the new year, 2010, and I am watching HGTV’s “Dream Home Giveaway” and at the back of my mind I am thinking of Arthur C. Clark’s novel 2010: Odyssey Two, which I have not read, but I remember the movie version where at the end Jupiter becomes a star, a [...]

The hard thing about receiving grace is that it transcends and undermines all norms of the world, the very norms that have had a profound influence on how we are personally substantiated and oriented to the world. The biblical concept of grace is a clear expression of God’s sovereignty, and thus it is not subject [...]

Somewhere between fifteen and twenty years ago I was praying to God, or I was having a conversation with myself, or rather I can’t say exactly what I was doing as the whole ordeal was a bit confusing, and yet a bit of enlightenment came in the midst of the chaos. The conversation arose out [...]

Generally speaking, disorder in your environment is an expression of disorder in your soul. On the other hand, order in your environment can be a cover for the disorder of your soul. Furthermore, disorder in your environment can be an indication that you are bringing order to your soul. As far as me personally, my [...]

A few years ago I spent a semester reading the works of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Frost. Of all that I enjoyed that semester, I was most deeply touched by Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday.” It must be that his neurosis and mine are very similar. What I particularly like about “Ash Wednesday” is Eliot’s [...]

An angel comes to Mary and announces that she is favored of God, because she has been chosen to bear the messiah, to be the medium through which the Son of God would become one of us. Mary deserves honor, but she won’t get it, at least not immediately, and not among her own, because [...]

I am sitting in my office, and I hear the heater, and I feel stress: to wrap up this semester, to plan and prepare for the new history class I will be teaching, to keep up with my reading of scriptures, of trying to be a good husband, of trying to be a good dad, [...]

Last week I started a program of which the title, “Through The Bible In 90 Days,” says it all. Yes, it is a bit daunting as it requires a little more than half an hour of reading a day, and some of the books of the Bible are less than gripping. On the other hand, [...]