Church Hurt: 4 Reasons from Jesus Why Churches Can Disappoint
Church hurt. Do you know what it’s like to be disappointed by church? In 1994, in the African country of Rwanda, one African people group named the Hutus tried to kill off another African people group called the Tutsis. In roughly 100 days, the Hutus slaughtered—it wasn’t war, it was genocide—approximately 800,000 Tutsis. To escape […]
What Is a Parable in the Bible? The What, Why, and How of Jesus’ Parables
Let’s consider the what, why, and how of Jesus’ parables in the Bible. What are parables? Why does Jesus speak in parables? How should they be interpreted? These are important questions, and the answers can be both simple and challenging. What Is a Parable? Imagine how hard it would be to teach the concept of […]
Keep Speaking These Unspeakable Words
We’re discovering some words which used to be fine to talk about, but which now have become increasingly unspeakable. These aren’t cuss words; rather, they’re Bible words. One of these increasingly unutterable Bible words is sin. The culture might still talk about sin as a guilty food pleasure or as a periodic habit of gambling. But when it […]
The Stewardship of Suffering
Grieving is sort of like finding yourself stranded on Mars. Imagine being spit out of a spaceship, tumbling onto the lonely surface of a hostile planet, facing a barren and treacherous landscape as far as the eye can see. As far as the heart can know. Grief is much like that, except a lot less […]
