Posts by Bob Lepine
November 29, 2023
Dear Friends, Do you minimize your sins? John Piper says we all do. He notes that all sin is rooted in some kind of lie. My sin is not that bad. There are much worse things than what I’m doing. Everyone does this. I can’t help it. God will overlook my sin. He knows I’m frail. I’m not sure there really is a God anyway. Think of the vocabulary you use to describe your sin. We use words like an accident,…
November 15, 2023
Dear Friends, When you think about gratefulness or giving thanks, what Bible verses come to mind? With Thanksgiving coming up next week, that’s a good question to ponder. Before you read any further, take a time out here and answer that question out loud. What verses or passages come to mind? I asked some friends that question years ago, and I imagine their answers and yours are not far apart. Most of them went straight to the Psalms, where over and over again we are…
November 8, 2023
Dear Friends, It may be one of the best known and most beloved poems of the 20th century. Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken was cited by President John F. Kennedy when he spoke at Amherst College in 1963, just months before his assassination. Writer Bernardo Aparicio García notes that “Ours is not a poetry-reading culture, but then again, it’s not like we’re total illiterates. There are still a few poems out there that just about everyone seems to have read, and…
October 25, 2023
Dear Friends, My wife and I have found ourselves pretty regularly reminding ourselves in recent years that most of the problems we face are first world problems. You know the kinds of things I’m talking about, right? The package from Amazon doesn’t arrive on time, as promised. The movie you’re trying to stream keeps buffering. The service at the restaurant was so slow! You had to go to a second grocery store to get your extra crunchy peanut butter because the first store was out. Think about…
October 18, 2023
Dear Friends, This week, I’m passing along something I read online. It’s a Facebook post written by Greg Stier, the founder of Dare2Share, an evangelistic outreach aimed primarily at teens and young adults. Greg posted about parenting, and I thought “I can relate.” I think his counsel is wise. Here’s what he wrote: Early on in our marriage my wife and I took one of those raising children courses that promised certain outcomes if certain principles were consistently followed. We did our best to…
October 11, 2023
Dear Friends, Our God is a holy God. Holier than you have ever imagined. The God of scripture is defined by His holiness. His love is a holy love. His mercy is a holy mercy. His justice is a holy justice. His righteousness is a holy righteousness. Where He stands is holy ground. He dwells on His holy mountain and is worshipped in His holy temple. His name is holy. His law is holy, and those who are his followers are a…
October 4, 2023
Dear Friends, When he was elected President in 1960, John F. Kennedy was 43 years old. He had two toddlers at the time, and the media loved showing the Leader of the Free World in the Oval Office with his children scampering about. He may have had a Secret Service detail protecting him and a secretary scheduling his every appointment, but his children had priority access to their father. I’m sure there were times when the children were told…
SEPTEMBER 27, 2023
Dear Friends, On a Tuesday in mid-December of 2020, I was in a recording session in our old FamilyLife studios here in Little Rock. It was our practice before each recording session to have lunch with our guests, to help them relax and talk about the upcoming programs we would be recording. We all left the recording session that day feeling good about the programs we had produced. On Friday, one of the people who had been in the session with us…
SEPTEMBER 20, 2023
Dear Friends, Human beings are religious people. It’s not a question of whether you worship a deity or not. It’s only a question of which deity you choose to worship. Novelist David Foster Wallace made this point in a 2005 commencement address to the graduating class at Kenyon College. Before the phrase “go viral” was applied to online content, his address achieved that status. Here’s part of what he told his audience as they sat waiting to receive their diplomas. “In the day-to-day trenches of…
SEPTEMBER 13, 2023
Dear Friends, I’m pretty sure I spend more time reading these days than I did 10 or 15 years ago. Some of that is a function of my season of life. There is more time available once your children are gone. And over the past couple of years, I’ve had increased flexibility in my schedule that has given me more available time to read. So I do. But I’m also pretty sure I’m now reading fewer books than I used to read. …
SEPTEMBER 6, 2023
Dear Friends, I have spent this week being reminded of how great a gift music is. God has created us to be people who worship Him. And He gave us music as a way to engage our hearts and minds in expressing our love and devotion for Him. Along with others form our worship team at Redeemer, I’ve been in Nashville with more than 6,000 people thinking about how music is also a tool we use for fulfilling the Great Commission. You’ve probably…
AUGUST 30, 2023
Dear Friends, You recognize a false dichotomy when you see one, right? I’ll give you an example. “Which does God care more about in our lives: Our knowledge and understanding of Him (theology) or how we live our lives and love others (orthopraxy)?” If you ask the average person today to pick A or B, most people will tell you that how we live our lives is higher on God’s priority list than whether we have our doctrinal ducks in a row. Even…
JUNE 28, 2023
Dear Friends, I sat across the table from Pastor Tommy Nelson who has for years served as the Pastor at Denton Bible Church as he told me about the day his body shut down. He was still breathing. He could still see and hear everything that was happening around him. He simply couldn’t respond. Couldn’t move. When his wife spoke to him, he could hear her questions just fine. And he had answers. But his mouth wouldn’t work. All signs pointed to a…
JUNE 21, 2023
Dear Friends, “I try to be a good person.” That’s how most people will respond if you ask them why they believe they will go to heaven when they die. It is, of course, a disastrous way to think. It’s akin to thinking that you can arrive at the gates to Disneyland and suggesting that they should let you in because you try to be a good person. They will smile at you and tell you “that’s nice, but that’s not how it works here.” The…
JUNE 14, 2023
Dear Friends, Some of you have asked about our recent trip to Israel. There were 32 of us who traveled together for seven days seeing amazing sites and thinking together about the events that happened thousands of years ago in the exact spots where we were standing. As I’ve told people many times, visiting Israel changes how you read your Bible. When you’ve been on a boat on the Sea of Galilee and stood along the banks of the Jordan…
JUNE 7, 2023
Dear Friends, It was in early June, about five years ago, when I first realized that Pride Month had become a thing. Mary Ann and I were in Plano Texas where we were attending a weekend marriage conference. We had arrived a day ahead of the event, and our hotel was adjacent to a nearby shopping and entertainment venue. So we decided to stroll through the area and find a place for dinner. It seemed that every shop in the area had…
MAY 24, 2023
Dear Friends, Have you ever stopped to think about what you’re really praying when you pray “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors?” You might want to pause for a minute and ask yourself if you really want to pray that familiar petition from the Lord’s Prayer. When you do, you’re asking God to forgive you in the same way that you forgive everyone who has sinned against you. Augustine called this “the terrible petition.” He said if we pray this…
MAY 17, 2023
Dear Friends, In June of 2020, Tim Keller announced that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He faced the diagnosis with characteristic honesty and resolve. He knew that 80% of the people who receive that diagnosis are dead with a year. He has battled and beaten those odds. But he has also been aware that like all of us, his condition is terminal. That’s why when he received the diagnosis, he quoted Psalm 90. “Teach us to number our days.” I…
MAY 10, 2023
Dear Friends, In 1956, Johnny Cash was backstage waiting to perform at a concert in Gladewater, Texas, when he picked up his guitar and started picking out the chords to a new song. These now familiar lyrics began to wrap their way around those chords. I keep a close watch on this heart of mine,I keep my eyes wide open all the time,I keep the ends out for the tie that binds,Because you’re mine, I walk the line. I find it very,…
MAY 3, 2023
Dear Friends, Are Christians called to be bold? Before you jump right to the “sometimes” answer, let’s think about this for a minute. It’s not that “sometimes” is the wrong answer. But maybe we need to think this through a little more carefully. I think we may have a caricature in our minds about what it means to be bold. What comes to mind for me is the speech given by President Thomas J. Whitmore, played by Bill Pullman, in the 1996 movie…