Philip was a Frenchman with a taste for old-school style and charm. Always tanned, he wore freshly pressed white shirts with matching white trousers and a dark blue sports jacket with a white handkerchief in the front pocket. Whenever I spoke with Philip, I felt like I had a brush with European royalty. The look, [...]
One thing to keep in mind is that the Bible seems to show us that there are two different kinds of miracles, not just one.
Instantaneous miracles
The first kind of miracle is where God supernaturally removes or resolves a problem, like when someone is physically ill and God removes the sickness. I call these “instantaneous [...]
My “claim to fame” is that I’ve been hit on the head by a television evangelist—twice. Had someone told me six months before this occurred that I would be on stage with a TV preacher who was wearing a fifteen-hundred dollar suit and a pinky ring, I would have said he was insane. I’ve learned, [...]
I remember visiting a man in the hospital. His liver was failing, and he was about to die. He had been an alcoholic his entire adult life, and now that he was dying, he had begun to blame God for his condition. On one visit I couldn’t stand his ranting any longer, so I stood [...]
A few years ago our church staff went on a retreat to a lake house in the Catskills of New York. One afternoon our student ministries pastor, Matt, and I had the bright idea to paddle out to the middle of the lake in a canoe, in the forty-degree water, to fish. As we left [...]
Six months after I graduated from seminary, I wrote a letter to the editor of our local newspaper. A radical group of New Testament scholars, operating under the name The Jesus Seminar, had come to town for one of their annual meetings. Their audaciously self-appointed task, as a group of “biblical experts,” was to decide [...]
When you read some psalms you’ll notice that interspersed among the kicking, screaming, and pleading is something biblical scholars call “a vow of praise.” We see a perfect example of this in Psalm 43, which begins with a desperate petition:
Vindicate me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation; rescue me from deceitful [...]
When I was a kid, the city where I lived hosted an annual Easter egg hunt at a park down the street from my house. One year as I stood at the starting line, I spotted, off in the distance, the golden egg. Each year the officials of the event placed one large, glistening golden [...]
The book of Philippians is a letter the apostle Paul sent to a congregation he had started less than a year earlier. Years ago I was struck by the similarity between our church and the Philippian congregation. I became intrigued by Paul’s statement that he had “the affection of Christ Jesus” for the Philippian people.
I [...]
At the end of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the main character, Ivan, who has sought power and prestige his whole life, lies in bed in excruciating pain. When his physician arrives, Ilyich refuses any pain medication and throws the doctor out of his room, choosing instead to fully experience his final moments with [...]
