Hiding From God

I found this one helpful: ‘I struggle with spiritual perfectionism. It comes from many years of legalistic tendencies where I struggle to see obedience to God as a joy and an honor and tend to see it instead as an opportunity to try to earn the salvation that He’s freely given. It’s an extremely difficult heart posture to overcome, and I often see it come through in the spiritual disciplines that I try to incorporate in my life.’

Have You Eliminated Submission from Your Life?

I think this one brings an important challenge, particularly for those of us in church ministry (perhaps even especially those of us in smaller churches).

The Overview Effect

This one draws some lessons from The Overview Effect, that sense of awe and smallness astronauts feel when they look at the earth from space.

What Is Sin?

It seems like an obvious question, but over the centuries, a multitude of Christians have tried to define exactly what sin is. This one runs through the biblical data and some of the historical and modern understandings.

A Tale of Two Grandfathers: On Being Civil in an Uncivil Age

This was a good one and very much a message for our times using two figures from the past.

Why the pulpit might be the place for various interpretative views – sometimes

Dave Williams takes a contrary view to a post I wrote earlier in the week here about why I don’t think the pulpit is typically the place for laying out different interpretive views. I’m not sure we disagree hugely and I do agree with Dave’s conclusion: ‘The important thing is that whether in the pulpit or at the lecture lectern and even here on the blog… I want them to be left hearing what God has to say to them and what they should do about it.’

From the archive: Why being a ‘bad teacher’ might help our people grow

‘We can hardly expect to see people grow up to handle the Word well if we never expect them to be able and we can’t realistically expect to see people engaged in pastoral ministry if we never give them opportunities to engage in it. Our children don’t gain skills, knowledge and maturity by never expecting them to gain those things, giving them no opportunity to acquire them and always doing everything for them. No. We push them to acquire skills, to learn, to grow. These things are no less important for our churches.’