Pastoral Burnout: Getting Below the Surface
Author’s note: This is my second article dealing with pastoral burnout. Recent Barna research revealed that 33% of ministers had given serious thought to quitting. My own research for a graduate studies project showed 63% of those surveyed had given or were giving serious thought to quitting the ministry. In the first article, I wrote […]
Why Is the Bible So Hard to Understand? 3 Reasons
Why is the Bible so hard to understand? Here are some key takeaways from this article: The Bible can be hard to understand because we don’t take time to see what it says. We need to learn the skills of “observation.” The Bible can be hard to understand because we don’t take time to figure […]
Who Was Zipporah in the Bible?
Zipporah lived approximately 1500 years before Christ and she was the wife of Moses. She acted decisively in a crucial moment to protect her family, and she helped her husband fulfill his obligation to God. After four hundred years in Egypt, the Israelites cried out for God to rescue them from slavery, and God raised […]
4 Reasons to Pray that Go Beyond My Physical Needs
We usually think of prayer as asking things of God or at least talking to Him, thanking Him and praising Him. However, let me suggest that prayer is first of all listening to God. 1. We pray to listen to God. In prayer, God has our attention. We don’t have to ask for His attention; […]
The Family You Know You Need
Serenity often overruns the clock (and everything else) during my morning coffee. My deck provides the perfect spectator seat to the herd of deer that frequently visit the back field. I became captivated by a tender fawn, fumbling to climb the bank from the creek to catch up to its mother. In that moment, it […]
Which Character in Proverbs Are You?
Proverbs is a collection of sayings, stories, and metaphors that were used to train young men how to rule and govern themselves and others. Most proverbs are from Solomon teaching his sons and sharing wisdom from his father David. Solomon wanted to develop young men into trying/trained men. He used language to help the reader […]
Feeling Alone in Ministry?
“Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people. For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. […]
Because You Say So, I Will
God’s ways are higher than our ways, so it’s no wonder that some of His commands don’t always make sense to us. Throughout the Bible, we see examples of people being asked to do things that defy human logic. In the fifth and sixth chapters of Luke, Jesus repeatedly asked people to take actions that […]
