What do you know about your best friend? I don’t mean personal knowledge, like how funny he is or how kindhearted she is. Certainly you know that. But what information do you know? Probably their birthday, where they live, where they work. You know their likes and dislikes, most likely their opinions on various issues. You know their passions. You […]
If you had been asked, before reading the title of this post, to come up with some descriptions of Jesus, what would you have said? In my case, I probably would have said Savior, Healer, Lord, even friend. But I would never have thought of “brother.” That’s a very bold, audacious thing to say — to call God in the […]
Last month around this time was the International Day for the Persecuted Church. One of my first posts was on that very topic. My pastor preached in church that morning using a book called The Insanity of God. It was full of stories about people who, under the threat of persecution and death, did absolutely insane things, completely disregarding their […]
As a teenager living in the suburbs of Chicago, the cable TV in my bedroom was a place I spent way too much time. When I started really getting interested in my faith, I stumbled across this channel called TBN. TBN stands for Trinity Broadcasting Network, but don’t be fooled by the name. Basically, on that channel, all of the […]
On Thursday, NASA is expected to hold a press conference about a new find made by its Kepler planet-hunting telescope. It’s possible it could involve finding an extrasolar planet that’s very similar to Earth. This isn’t 20th-century science fiction anymore. Gone are the days when talk of extraterrestrial life centered around UFOs and abductions by little green men. It’s no […]
Some of us may have seen the statistics: somewhere around 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys are sexually abused before the age of 18, and even more in adulthood. Those are astonishing statistics. That means if you’re in a room with 100 people, about 20 were sexually abused at some point in their lives. But we don’t talk […]
Pope Francis, head of the Roman Catholic Church, has made news for being one of the most unconventional recent popes. He has suggested that the Catholic Church needs to change its attitude toward certain issues, opted to eschew the typical papal residence for a modest guesthouse, and occasionally drawn the ire of both political conservatives and theologically conservative Catholics. He […]
You couldn’t find two people from history that were more opposite than Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the founder of Christianity, and the Emperor Constantine the Great, the founder of Christendom. Jesus was a humble Jewish preacher, born and raised in poverty, in the backwoods hick town of Nazareth; Constantine was a Roman emperor, born to a prominent military commander in […]
Does God speak to us? Most people would say yes. Even though very few people actually hear an audible, heavenly voice, we recognize that God speaks to us in other ways. We have the Bible, which we call the word of God. We also spend time in prayer to communicate with God, and it’s hard to imagine that’s a one-way […]
Turn the other cheek. It’s one of the most well-known sayings of Jesus. Just about everyone has heard it; just about everyone has used it. But do we really understand what it means? It definitely shocked Jesus’ hearers. They lived in a war-weary land that was plagued by violence. In the last century alone, they’d suffered under the rule of […]
Just another jar of clay, named Clay. I’m a Christ-follower who messes up a lot, blessed to be a husband and youth worker, trying to share the message that saved me. My aim with this blog is to explore how we ought to live and think as Christ-followers in the midst of the realities of today’s world.
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