Made to serve

In the last few years I have observed an increasing number of businesses training their employees to respond to requests for help from patrons with the phrase, “It’s my pleasure.” These businesses want their customers to feel like they are not an imposition but a joy. That kind of attitude is implied in the care […]

Sermon: Cultivating Ministry

“Cultivating Ministry” Ephesians 4:11-12 January 17, 2016 We live in an entertainment culture. We go to the gym to exercise, step on a treadmill and have a TV screen facing us to watch. But most don’t watch – they have their own private entertainment in their own headphones. Or perhaps you prefer an aerobics class […]

Sermon: Cultivating Community

“Cultivating Community” Ephesians 4:1-3 January 10, 2016 Tom Pennington tells the story recounted in the book Great Church Fights by Leslie Flynn. The tale recounts a feud in a Welsh church looking for a new pastor. The newspaper article read this way — Yesterday the two opposition groups both sent ministers to the pulpit. Both […]

Slain in the Shadow of the Almighty – from Desiring God

John Piper writes this morning: On January 8, 1956 — sixty years ago today — Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Flemming, and Roger Youderian were speared to death on a sandbar called “Palm Beach” in the Curaray River of Ecuador. They were trying to reach the Huaorani Indians for the first time in […]

Watch and pray

Several years ago I was driving down a county road through some ranch land a few miles from my house when I saw him. Hanging upside down with his bound hind legs draped over a fence post was a very dead fox. And just like a turtle on a fence, it was obvious he didn’t […]

Keep up daily prayer

Wednesdays with Watson is a weekly reading taken from my favorite Puritan writer, Thomas Watson. This week’s selection is taken from Heaven Taken by Storm. Keep up daily prayer. Prayer is the bellows that blows up the affections, and a Christian is most active when his affections are most violent. Prayer keeps the trade of […]

Sermon: Pray for One Another

“Pray for One Another” Ephesians 3:14-21 January 3, 2016 In my freshman year in college, I began to grow significantly in my spiritual life. One part of that growth was that I began attending a Wednesday evening Bible study — and part of that study was a prayer time with other men in the church […]

The best books I read in 2015

The year 2015 was a good year of reading for me. A couple of years ago I found that I was having more difficulty paying attention when reading. I was breezing through many blogs and short works like magazine articles, but didn’t have as much patience for reading longer works. When revising my goals for […]