When The Pursuit Of Justice Isn't: Justice in the Bible is not some nebulous fairness or sense of altruistic equality. It is the spreading dominion of the righteousness of God. (Note how often justice is paired with righteousness in the Bible.) When God calls us to “do justice,” he is calling us to reflect the life-giving, culture-flourishing, gracious abundance that is in keeping with his glory.

Pornolesence: So many young Christians have stunted their spiritual growth through what I call pornolesence. Pornolescence is that period when a person is old enough and mature enough to know that pornography is wrong and that it exacts a heavy price, but too immature or too apathetic to do anything about it.

The Trip Is The True Adventure: Car trips are fascinating microcosms for conversations that affect and reinforce our shared story as a family. Perhaps this summer’s travel time holds for you a conversation that will change or clarify your own life’s adventure. But you won’t have it if you don’t turn down the volume or disconnect the digital movie playing in the back seat. Use the sacred space of a road trip to explore and deepen your own shared story with the people who matter most.

Keep Up The Prayer Meetings All You Can: If you want your people as well as yourself to be soul-winners, try and keep up the prayer meetings all you can.

Could the Persecuted Church Rescue American Christianity?: Moreover, this nominal Christianity has emphasized the “values” and “meaning” aspects of Christianity while often downplaying the “strangeness” of Christianity, namely the conviction that a previously dead man is alive and returning to judge the living and the dead.

Men Hear With Their Eyes: Of course, this is just one aspect of learning to communicate with the man you have given yourself to. But it is a good place to start! "When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but whoever restrains his lips is prudent" (Pro. 10:32).

Dads, Date Your Daughter's Boyfriends: One of the most terrifying moments of a not-yet-married man’s life is meeting his girlfriend’s father. The much-anticipated introduction is an unending fountain of humor for friends and family, but it’s more often an occasion for horror for the young man. What will dad say? What will he ask? Will he be armed? The moment is a mountain to overcome in almost any relationship, but I believe it’s a mountain we, as Christians, can capture for the good of the daughter, the suitor, and the father.

Stories Of My Dad: God gave me a great dad.  He was the finest man I’ve ever known — and the best pastor, and the best preacher, by far.  I drew strength from his love for me.  I miss him today.  I miss him every day. Here are some reasons why I honor him.  And these are just for starters.

Happy Failure's Day: If you’re a dad, you know what it means to fail. On Father’s Day, don’t dwell on your failures; remember how Jesus has overcome them.

Knowing God or Knowing About God?: If we reduce knowing God (in a deep relational sense) to knowing things about God, then we’re going to find ourselves producing disciples that look like demons – who have perfect knowledge of God but refuse to treasure Him.

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To: Dad, Love: Your Adoptive Daughter: Thank you for attending all of my ballet recitals as a little girl. Thank you for discipling me and teaching me the godly way to live. Thank you for making sure that I heard the gospel regularly taught and saw it lived out. Thank you for allowing me to pour my heart out over a cup of coffee. Thank you for working hard to provide for the family. Thank you for being selfless.

Honesty, Truth and Homosexuality: The world is talking about homosexuality. The conversation is impossible to ignore if you are paying any attention to cultural currents. News outlets, Twitter, blogs, television shows and even federal courts are conversing. What they are saying is fascinating. It is also frustrating.

How Our Thoughts Feed (or starve) Our Passion For Jesus: When Edwards speaks of "religion" he is speaking of a living, vital relationship with Jesus, clearly different than how we use this term today.

Pastors Aren't Born But Formed: As a young pastor myself, one theme that caught my attention was the formative influence of mentors and friends. In what follows I'd like to highlight three lessons on mentorship for both younger and older pastors drawn from Calvin's early years.

Pornography And Gospel Community: One of my elders at church taught a class Sunday on pornography. He was vulnerable and honest about his own serious struggle with pornography after being exposed to it at a very young age through sexual deviancy among the adults in his home. I found his lesson relevant to men who've struggled with pornography, women who've struggled with pornography, men who haven't struggled with pornography, and women who haven't struggled with pornography. Since that probably covers all the readers here, I thought I would share the progression of his thoughts.

Worship - A Biblical Definition: Notice that I also use the word “response” in my definition. Before the fall, we were primarily responders. God is the actor, displaying His love for us, and we responded in worship. This is the natural order of things. Today, we attempt to be the actors, and we hope that others will respond to us.

Summer Family Activity Book: Summer is fast approaching! For many of you, the next few months will be filled with travel, adventure and increased opportunities to spend time together as a family. As you begin to think about and plan how you will spend the next few months, we’d like to once again present you with the Summer Family Activity Book. This resource gives you ideas on how to be intentional with your time together as a family.

5 Reasons Established Churches Should Plant Churches: Most people know me I love church planting. I've done extensive research on the topic, written books about it and even planted churches. In addition to my love for church planting, however, I also love established churches. I'm as passionate about church revitalization as I am about church planting. While some may see the two as mutually exclusive, I'm most excited about where the two overlap: churches planting churches. Pastors of established churches should be engaged in church planting. Here are five reasons why.

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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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Grace Is Not A Thing: The great American theologian Al Pacino once said, “I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn't work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.” Pacino’s statement taps into a tension that we all sense intuitively but maybe have not expressed explicitly. If God is forgiving, then why strive for a holy life? If the penalty has been paid, then why must progress be made? I believe the tension felt here ultimately comes from a confused view of grace.

Self-Awareness And The Sufficiency Of Christ: Are you fully aware of or in touch with the extent to which your joy and happiness in life are tied to your physical and financial circumstances?

Why Don't We See Miracles Like The Apostles Did?: Even if we don't frequently see extraordinary miraculous events, God is active. He is active in the regular (natural) processes we see every day. He is miraculously calling people to himself as his church grows and expands. He is active in miraculous ways among people we don't know around the world.

If Not Me, Then Who?: Memorial Day is a time for honoring those who have given their lives for their nation, and one of the best ways to honor heroes is to learn from them.

How Human Was Jesus?: Faults, flaws, and mistakes are an unavoidable part of human life. But the Bible tells us that Jesus is fully man, yet without sin. What does it mean for Jesus to be both fully God and fully human?

What I've Learned In Twenty Years of Marriage: "Apart from the gospel, those were, and remain, the most liberating words I ever heard. I bought a ring that wouldn’t impress anyone, then or now, but we were headed for the altar. My only regret is that we aren’t today celebrating our twenty-first anniversary instead of our twentieth..."

Ten Years Later, Why Gay Marriage Is Winning: After four same-sex couples filed suit Wednesday (May 21) challenging Montana’s ban on same-sex marriage, neighboring North Dakota is the only state that isn’t facing a challenge to its gay marriage ban — at least not yet. So what changed? The issue is far from settled — and some conservatives insist that it never will be — but pro-gay groups clearly have the momentum. Here’s why:

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3 Ways A Man Should Lead His Home: A man who loves Jesus and leads his family well has at least three roles in common with the man who is called to lead the church.

4 Ways to Love Those With Mental Illness: It is time to face the fact that there are millions of people who struggle with mental illness and the church must rise up and disciple them. Jesus Christ is greater than any mental illness and even though anxiety wins many of battles, I always remember that Jesus Christ has already won the war. We will be raised up. We will have new creation bodies. We will not suffer forever. He is the resurrection and life.

Blue Collar Man: On Financial Struggle and Working For A Living: In general, youngish-Reformed evangelicals tend to be a pretty affluent, heavily degreed, upwardly mobile lot with a surplus of time to read websites and grow their considerable book collections. [1] With “providing” often being a top priority for Reformed men, this group generally has a clear vocational plan and usually gets plenty of opportunities to implement said plan. And because we tend to be small-government capitalists, we tend to feel pretty good about ourselves when we’re making lots of bank–and don't feel conflicted about enjoying it. And in general (again), readers of TGC tend to be pastors, professors, seminary students, theology nerds, or wives of the aforementioned. But what about those who don't fit this social/cultural Reformed paradigm, including in their vocations? 

God's Will For Your Wait: Sometimes God calls us to wait, and that is hard. But waiting for God is not passive; it is active, purposeful, and spiritual.

Stuck In Relationships: I've spent thousands of hours in counseling sessions with people who are stuck in relationships. It wasn't always a husband and wife in a marriage gone bad; any two people in any type of relationship can find themselves stuck.

The Child Of The Future: Like college football, the world for young people has changed dramatically. High exposure to media via technology and the deluge of mixed messages in the culture have created an incredibly difficult landscape for parents and children to navigate.

The God Of Diverse Excellencies: Jesus is calling. Do you hear his voice? There is no voice like his. Only in Jesus Christ will you find a God who is both a strong Lion and a slain Lamb. Only in him will you find a God of so many beautiful and diverse excellencies.

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The Practice of Repentance: Most of us don’t naturally enjoy repenting when we’re wrong, but for leaders especially, repentance is a powerful, essential, and liberating practice.

9 Ways To Battle The Darkness: I love Jesus and he loves me. But I have struggled with fear, anxiety, condemnation, and even depression my whole Christian life. I actually struggled so much with these issues that I had to resign from my first pastorate. I wasn’t eating, I couldn’t get out of bed, I was having demonic nightmares, and I was thinking about suicide. I’m not out of the woods yet, but I have learned a few things in going through these struggles about God’s grace despite our failures to trust him. Though each of us faces unique circumstances, here are a few lessons I have learned that I pray will help as you, too, battle depression, condemnation and anxiety.

How Jesus Changes Motherhood: Trying to be the perfect mom can be a crushing weight, and sometimes Mother’s Day only makes it worse. We hope these stories from regular moms relying on Jesus in the midst of failure and imperfection will encourage you.

Offer Advice Very Carefully: Giving advice goes poorly so often, it is worth more careful thought about how we give it. We all need advice. We seek it every day. That is a wise and natural part of being a creature rather than the Creator. But we also know that advice can run from helpful to horrible, and it can bless a relationship or hurt it. 

What Kind of Church Should You Belong To?: Being in a healthy local church is critical to the spiritual health of men. But how do you know if you’re in a healthy church?

Miracles In a Modern Age: Anyone familiar with Jesus knows he spent a lot of time healing people. Those healings seem so foreign to modern disciples, as if from a far away land, the stuff of mythology or fiction. Yet, his healing ministry didn’t stick with him; Jesus spread his power to heal into the lives of his followers. Does this mean that we too, as modern disciples, should practice healing? What should we expect when praying for it? Let’s take a quick look at the 1st century to get our bearings. Then, we can turn to our response in the 21st century.

 "How should the Great Commission affect marriage?" 

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