


What Good Friday Means to Me Now
On this Good Friday, I’m reflecting on the cross where Jesus died, and I’m re-reading a chapter in Brian Zahnd’s Sinners In the Hands of a Loving God, about what Jürgen Moltmann called “the crucified God.” Zahnd says, The cross is many...
What John 3:16 Says About a Wonderful World Worth Saving
At our wedding, we played Louis Armstrong’s famous song, What a Wonderful World. That song would later become pretty problematic for me because of some poorly formed theology, some of which you may be familiar with. The world is bad and evil, as are all the people...
My Confession of Faith – A Modern Creed for Worship
I’ve now been in ministry for about twenty-five years. That isn’t long compared to a lot of my heroes who are still living and serving, but it’s long enough that I’ve seen plenty of change happen within the American Christian and evangelical...
Yes, Jesus IS the Answer
Racism has been a part of the human story for thousands of years. The Bible itself contains the history of tribal wars in Abraham’s day, the rise of empericalism and slavery and on into the New Testament when the question of whether the Messiah came to save the...
Good News: Jesus Has Been Enthroned as King
The gospel is more than a few steps toward salvation and it’s more than a particular doctrine of justification. The gospel is the good news that Jesus, God’s Son, became the Messiah and Savior of Israel and of the rest of the world, that he died on a Roman...
Experiencing the Empowerment of the Holy Spirit
In the world of sales, there is often the product, and then there is the enhanced edition of the product. Is the upsell worth it? Depends on if you want the basic version or the full-featured version with all the bells and whistles. In my Christian walk, I want all...
4 Reasons Modern Worship Services Should Engage the Emotions
I hear it all the time and it’s blogged about regularly… Modern worship songs and services are just too much emotionalism and not enough doctrine. Long ago, I wrote a blog post to that very effect. I revisited the issue a few years ago and deleted that old...
How to Have the Anointing of God on Your Life
That word… anointing… is tricky. If you grew up in a charismatic / pentecostal environment, you might associate the anointing with a particular ecstatic experience, or with the practice of anointing the sick with oil and prayer, or perhaps with the...