Mining And Refining: So, friends, when these trials and grievances come your way, preach the gospel to yourself and to others. God could not love you and be satisfied with leaving you as a piece of ore. You have so much potential in Christ, and the Lord will refine you so you can reach your highest level of strength and beauty!

The Danger of Coasting: I’ve been thinking about this lately because I see in my own life a tendency to coast—to coast in my relationships, to coast in my pursuit of godliness, to coast in my pursuit of God himself. And here are some things I’ve observed:

Praying for Our Child's Salvation: There is nothing automatic about salvation. There is no room for mere presumption; Christian parenting is an enterprise of faith. God’s promise gives us a solid foundation for all our prayers and for all our hopes for our children. But He also commands us to use the appointed means to obtain His good gifts. Do you pray daily for your children? Do you pray daily with your children? If not, what can you expect from the Lord? Whether they are saved or not, are you able to say, by God’s grace, that you storm the mercy seat for them with a heart aflame for their well-being and God’s glory?

7 Ways To Love Your Pastor: When my husband (my favorite pastor!) was ordained to be a minister of the gospel, one of the elders who ordained him, Pastor Paul Martin, spoke to our congregation and charged us with this: Beloved, let me give you this one charge: Love your pastor! In this charge, Pastor Paul shared seven ways that a congregation can love their shepherd, and his words of encouragement are applicable to every local church context.

Push Through The Awkward: There is one piece of advice I give myself and other women more than any other and it is this: push through the awkward. We are women who long for community and to live lives of purpose, but as anything that is good and beautiful and worth having, these things don't come just because we want them. They are invited by those who push through the awkward.

Gospel-Driven Productivity: I’m not saying that there should be no exceptions to this. But it is the foundational guideline for effectiveness. By working in this way, you actually get more done, not less, because you are able to get in the zone and reduce the amount of time that your tasks actually take. 

Television's Rape Epidemic: Here is what I wonder, and here is what we ought to be asking ourselves: If Christians won’t allow explicit scenes of sexual violence to keep them from watching television shows, what will? If scenes of rape are not over the edge, what is? If we won’t draw the line there, will we draw it anywhere?

Christ The Educator: There is a great richness of meaning in these texts that goes beyond our discussion here. But with renewed eyes as disciples of Jesus we can hear him invitation to learn and be trained in soul by our gracious Christ, the Educator.

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Discipleship In The Teen Years: Some of them get it. Their little hearts embrace the truth and they ask Jesus to save them. We rejoice, knowing that their future is secure and that the Father holds them close. But our job doesn’t end there. What happens when that little heart grows into a bigger heart and questions the gospel he learned and believed as a kid? What happens when the joyful little girl who knew the love of Jesus begins to look shadowed and burdened, wondering if it all makes sense?

What Is Prayer? And Why Should We Pray?: What exactly is prayer and why should you do it anyways? Is it just for those people who don’t have any friends because they think they are too holy to interact with others, or is it for the rest of us as well? Prayer is simply talking with God. When God created us, he made us with the ability to do something amazing, by actually being able to talk personally with him.

Be Strong And Courageous - Literally: So Scripture may not mandate fitness, but we should regard bodily strength as normal, wise, and good. When professionals sit at desks all day, we can lose contact with our embodied nature. Exercise helps us recover our whole self, so we can heed the call to be strong and courageous.

Full Of Grace And Truth: But he didn’t come simply to give us an example of grace and truth.  He came to save us in grace and truth.  It’s only after we’ve been saved and made right with God, the God says, “Alright, now that I have saved through Jesus, you need to know that I have saved you to look like Jesus.”  The motivation to be full of grace and truth is not because we need to earn God’s favor, but because being a follower of Jesus Christ, means we look like the one we follow.

Ordinary People, Ordinary Mission: There is great appeal in pursuing exotic or “extraordinary” mission. But the Bible calls us to look a little closer as we live out Jesus’ mission: those in need and our neighbors.

Without This Your Missional Movement Will Fail: From all my experience leading my church and working with other churches, I’ve seen in us a tendency to play this either/or game with discipleship of our own and evangelism of the masses. We’ll either spend all our time developing our own, shutting off outsiders, or open our doors wide to the world and keep it shallow with our training. But what do the Scriptures say?

Be The Father You Want To Be: Most guys fail to parent their children well because they don’t know how to parent themselves. Men that don’t know how to handle their own immaturity and failings are at a loss when it comes to their children’s immaturity and failings. Men tend to go in one of two directions. They either fail to appropriately grieve their brokenness or they fail to acknowledge their brokenness.

Does God Care About Productivity: I would argue that the call to be productive (Genesis 1:28) also implies the need to learn how to be productive. Yet, this is a slightly different question from the first, because one could presumably say “Yes, God wants us to be productive, but he doesn’t want us to fiddle with things like workflow systems and productivity tips and tools.”

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