Church Blog
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…
AUGUST 23, 2023
Dear Friends, Many times people are concerned with if the church is heading in the right direction and who is in charge of the church. Those questions arise from time to time and it is always good to go back to Scripture and be reminded of what is really true about the church. One of the things that makes Redeemer so beautiful to me is knowing that this is how Jesus sees us as a body: beautiful! Because we are individually…
AUGUST 16, 2023
Dear Friends, Please keep your thoughts and prayers with those on the island of Maui as they manage the devastation from the wildfires. I am sure it is a very trying time for everyone dealing with such pain and loss, especially those those who have lost loved ones. This has become deadliest natural disaster in modern U.S. history. Pray for God’s comfort to visit those who have been afflicted with such pain. Pray for the church there in Maui to care for those individuals…
AUGUST 10, 2023
Dear Friends, As I sit here and am thinking about you, I wonder, do you wonder? Do you wonder at the Gospel and Jesus’ great love for you, His people? Are you in awe that God would allow you to be part of his kingdom and what he doing in the world? It made me think of Paul Tripp’s book from almost 10 years ago, Awe. It reminds me that we are not to worship created things even if we deeply enjoy…
AUGUST 2, 2023
Dear Friends, Can you think back to the time where you were a sophomore in high school, or perhaps even college? The etymology of word “sophomore” is broken down like this: sophos is the greek word for “wise or clever” and moros means “foolish”. So, literally, when you are a sophomore, you are “a wise fool.” If you were anything like me as a 16-year-old sophomore, you may have been a little more fool than you were wise. However, according to 1 Corinthians 4:10, being…
JULY 26, 2023
Dear Friends, Ever wonder what real community is about? Ever heard the word koinonia and wondered what the heck people were talking about? If you are anything like me you might have in the past or even today wondered what the New Testament really teaches about it. I know in my early days as a new believer, I didn’t have a clue as to what God intended for me to know and to be shaped by and for.The word koinonia…
JULY 19, 2023
Hi everyone! In many of our Christian circles, we have all probably heard the phrase “established church”. “Oh! That church on that side of town is great. It’s an ESTABLISHED church.” Have you ever wondered what people meant by using this phrase to describe a church? What does the church in question have to be or have to have in order to be considered “established”? Does it need to have engaging preaching? Dynamic worship? Thriving small groups? Does it need…
JULY 12, 2023
Hi all! Many of you might have wondered, after I shared this past Sunday about growing up with pseudo faith, how I actually came to real faith in Jesus. If you grew up like me (which you probably didn’t do particularly, but maybe more so generally), you had no idea who Jesus was or how much God really loved you. I went to church most Sundays, was very involved in serving and then helping lead our youth group. But I was…
JULY 5, 2023
Hi all! Last week, I had the joy and privilege of leading some students on a 5-day mission trip to Memphis, TN. While we were there, we put on an outdoor Bible club for the children in the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods. Our Bible club offered games, crafts, songs, and Bible teaching that the students were heavily involved in. While we did this in the mornings, we participated in several afternoon projects as well. For example, we went on neighborhood…
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…