Thoughts of a Christian Husband, Father, and Pastor
Nick Hill posted this back before Christmas, but I reads it tonight and thought it would be worth posting here again. I can never think enough about how to kill pride and cultivate humility. Spiritual pride is: “the main door by which the devil comes into the hearts of those that are zealous for the [...]
This morning I lost at squash. That’s normal. How badly I lost at squash was a whole other story. In previous weeks I had thought that I’d been making progress, getting better. This morning, however, I don’t think I could have made a shot if we had’ve been using a beach ball. That’s embarrassing. It’s [...]
It’s a funny thing to me how lessons seem to weave themselves into our lives at seemingly ‘random’ points in time (which, of course, shows me that they’re not random at all). Over the past eight weeks or so, as I’ve been preaching through James, I’ve been amazed at how clearly he contradicts our contemporary [...]
Over the last few Sunday evenings at Grace Fellowship Church, my friend Paul McDonald has been opening up Galatians 5.13 for us. The verse reads like this: For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. Over the flow [...]
It’s hard to know sometimes what to blog about when there are so many different things going on in life. Here’s a few things I’ve been thinking about. Humility I’ve thought about this on this blog before, but I was blessed with the opportunity to teach on it recently at a men’s meeting at our [...]
As I posted before, CJ Mahaney’s blog has been featuring parts of his chapter on modesty from the forthcoming Crossway book called Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World. You can read the summary post here. It contains an index with links to each of the seven sections and some additional application questions as [...]
One of the greatest questions I think any young Christian (whether young as a person or young as a Christian–or both!) can ask is this: How can I become wise? To say that the Scriptures speak highly of wisdom is an understatement indeed (see here for just one example). So how does one attain it? [...]
This morning I found myself finishing up the last few chapters of Luke and realizing again just how desperately I need Jesus. I confess that for much of my Christian life I have seen my need of Jesus mainly in a soteriological sense (i.e. I need his vicarious death to accomplish forgiveness of my sins [...]
Tim Challies recently posted some reasons why God will not answer our prayers. About the same time I was wondering about unanswered prayer and got to thinking that perhaps much of what we call unanswered prayer is really prayer that we simply don’t see answered. The reasons for this could be legion, but here’s one [...]
I guess, technically, my last post on ‘poverty of spirit’ was here, but I’ve since posted on humility here and here as well. As we’ve seen in the other posts, there are many things which can cause us to lose our poverty of spirit and to become proud. Sometimes we lose sight of who God [...]
This past year in my Early Christian Spirituality course at TBS we had a lecture on Basil of Caesarea’s theology of humility. His twentieth homily was full of great theological insight and practical suggestions for how to live with greater humility. One of his suggestions for how to stir up humility is simply to recall [...]
I have had the privelege of filling the pulpit at Grace Fellowship Church for the past few weeks while ‘the preacher‘ (aka kerux) was away on vacation. The past two Sunday nights I tried to draw some more practical thoughts together with regards to poverty of spirit (see here, here, here, and here for the [...]
Here’s a post that a few of you may remember. I posted it a while back on my old blog. I read it today though, and thought it might be worth revisiting. So here it is, with a few minor revisions. __________________________________ Isn’t it interesting how God weaves themes together in the things we’re learning [...]
See parts 1, 2, and 3. We lose poverty of spirit because we lose sight of God. Once we lose sight of God it is easy to lose sight of how far short of his standard we really fall–we forget what we were when we were called. But someone might say, ‘but I was never [...]
See parts 1 and 2. So what causes Christians to lose their ‘poverty of spirit’? Losing sight of the God we say we worship is the main cause. But part and parcel with that comes losing sight of who we are and what we are really like. When we forget God, who is the ultimate [...]
So how could it be that Christians would become proud? Having started with nothing, how could receiving freely give us reason to boast? It seems that pride is the sneakiest of all sins, working from the core of the heart, seeking any opportunity to morph and reappear undetected. I think the first step in losing [...]
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” With these words our Lord’s ministry began in earnest. The long-awaited promised one brings the fulfilment of all that was foreshadowed in the Law and the Prophets in his person and his kingdom, and these are those to whom his kingdom belongs: [...]
Believe it or not, it happens quite often. From childhood up, I’ve been a rebel. I don’t want to listen to those over me. The things that people ask or tell me to do are oppressive… they’re not what I want to do, and so–more often than not–I don’t do them. When it comes to [...]
Please understand that I know the whole Augustinian / Pelagian (Calvinism / Arminianism) debate has been running its course for 16 centuries or so now, so I don’t intend to solve it here. That being said, I’m a little frustrated this evening at the “non-logic” employed by many Christians when it comes to working through [...]
I had intended to post on today’s sermon; God’s active hardening of sinners, from Romans 9.17-18… but kerux beat me to it. His new feature is fantastic, and he couldn’t have picked a better week to begin open discussions on his sermons. Instead of posting reflections on the sermon here as well as there, I [...]
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