What do you suppose will become of his reputation, his clients, his acceptance by his rather prominent family? Should he marry this unfaithful girl? How will he love and accept her child that is not their child? 

Have you ever thought about Mary and Joseph’s discussion on the way home from meeting with Simeon? Mothers aren’t usually too keen on the idea of swords piercing their souls, especially regarding their children.

Dear God: Your interpreters—the prophets and priests of the Old Testament—did their best to portray you in the best possible fashion. And even though they approached you, and most lived to write and tell about it, you remain dauntingly distant. 

Here’s my current recipe for holiday fare. Feel free to modify as you see fit, just don’t overcook it.

If you remove Life from the church, what you are left with is not a great deal different from the country club. 

The church is both an organism and an organization, one living, one dead. The Church living and the church corporate are not the same, nor are they interchangeable.

Not everyone in the church organization is a member of the Church organism. The fundamental distinction is that an organism has life while an organization is nothing more than an institution.

The benefit of you reading what I write makes my privilege a true joy. I'm grateful for you.

"I’m re-reading Battle for the Round Tower this week, and I just had to tell you: The reminder of Jester’s incessant work has been good for my soul this week."

A temporal place cannot assuage an eternal desire. Thus, to achieve what our hearts long to realize, a dying must occur. 

The biblical picture is of a seed dying and producing what it was never capable of producing in its natural state. 

The image Jesus created doesn’t stop there. Dying is prerequisite to both connection and multiplication.

It’s hardly a news flash to say that you can’t figure out what God is going to do most of the time. After all, He’s God and you aren’t. But this isn’t to say there aren’t aspects of God that are predictable. 

There’s the promise: the relentless, determined, predictable character of God. “I am with you.” You are mine. I’m going to take care of you. I am with you. 

But the fact of the matter is, God will not, cannot, depart from or compromise in the slightest His longsuffering mercy and faithfulness. 

There are aspects of God that are predictable. There are some ways in which you know generally what He is going to do, and there are many ways in which God can’t be categorized. 

God never wastes a sorrow, but there are varying degrees of this multiplication because we, like Israel, can be prone to waste the sorrows God honors. 

This is the way of God—and knowing this about God means an opportunity for development invariably is yours when hardship finds you.