Glorious Mud

We have a crisis of discontentment today.  We have more than we have ever had - but we are less content that we have ever been. So, here is the deal.  If you want to be content - you have to foster a healthy discontentment. Seriously.  You can't be content without it. A lot of people think of contentment as a passive state of simply being "OK" with your life.  That isn't contentment.  It is denial.  Or worse, it is despair - the loss of hope for something better. Contentment is not a passive acceptance of what is - it is the result of an active pursuit of what is better. We are discontent because have a hunger for something we don't have.  The problem isn't the hunger - the problem is that we try to feed that hunger with the wrong things.  We crave something - so we try to feed it with buying stuff, or with the distraction of entertainment, or with more and greater achievement.  And it doesn't work. You can't satisfy a desire for ...

Gratitude is a catalyst to gospel growth in our lives. Or, as Colin Powell would say, it is a force multiplier. I heard Colin Powell speak at a leadership event years ago and he talked about how military leaders are always looking for force multipliers - elements that are natural to the environment and will increase the effectiveness of your strength.  It might be a hill to come down or a ravine to travel up through or a line of trees to use as cover. In the Christian life, it is gratitude.  We can see this in a number of passages, like this one:     Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:4-7 ESV) The Bible is f...

I meet with a lot of young dudes.  Many of them show real leadership potential.  But more than anything else, one of the first things I look for is a deep and real gratitude to God.  I am convinced that one of the first signs that someone really "gets" the gospel (and by "gets," I simply mean "believe") is a deep sense of thankfulness. In fact, probably the most accurate prayer someone could utter after hearing the gospel is not, "Lord, please forgive me" but "Thank you." Why?  Because the gospel is the message that Jesus has won for us peace with God.  It's a done deal.  The payment is complete.  When Jesus came as our High Priest and offered himself as the substitutionary sacrificial lamb, he fully paid our sin-debt to God and completely satisfied God's anger toward our sin.  He took the cup of God's wrath and drank it to the dregs.  So, when he rose from the grave, that was proof that the payment was absolutely comple...

So, here is a familiar scenario:  You are standing in line at the grocery store and your little angel has been teetering on the dark side of angelic all morning.  The tipping point comes when you hit the check out line and your child sees that bright and colorful something that was perfectly places to create a crisis for parents. It happens.  Your child reaches out and grunts - or worse, actually swipes it as you walk by.  And you take a deep breath and say the magic word: No.  And in that moment, your little angel crosses completely over to the dark side and becomes a midget demon.  The thrashing and wailing begin.  Other parents move slowly away.  The security guard talks quietly on his walkie-talkie as he moves where he can watch your every move.  The clerk stares at you with her blank stare and saucer eyes. And in that moment, you wish you had the silver bullet that would kill that tantrum and restore your child to "angelic" statu...

Conflict in marriage is inevitable.  People are different - and when to you take two people as different as a man and a women (as much as they might love each other) and put them around each other for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week - they are going to fight. Most married couples are not well equipped to fight well because they simply don't understand how they should fight and what they should be fighting for.  The Bible gives us remarkable (and challenging) insight into how we are wired and why we end up in conflict - and when we understand that, we will be better prepared to fight well. The bottom line is that God gave us marriage to make us holy first and make us happy second.  Holiness can be an intimidating word - but it simply means that we are what God has made us to be.  When we are becoming more holy, we are becoming more of the person God has designed us to be. And as we become holier, we are in a better position to experience and share God's best in...

When I got married, I had only been a believer for about three years.  I was drunk with the gospel - I knew I didn't deserve God's grace and was excited that I had it anyway.  I was devouring the Bible and was trying to figure out what it all meant. One of the areas in scripture that challenged me was the Bible's teaching on roles in marriage.  Honestly, I didn't really want to be "the head" of the home - I had much more egalitarian leanings.  At the same time, I wanted to honor God in my home, so I set about trying to be the leader of my home.  Thankfully God's grace (and my wife's) was greater than my good intentions.  I didn't lead well in the early days - I led out of positional authority (I have the title so you have to do what I say) instead of from personal authority (I have won your trust through love and self-sacrifice, and therefore you are willing to follow me). Jesus leads us from a position of personal authority, and we need to do ...

I preached on Philemon last week.  It is Paul's shortest letter - and his only letter that is addressed to a single person instead of a church.  It is a valuable glimpse into how the early church navigated the challenge of applying the gospel to the mess of community.  What happens when an escaped slave becomes a follower of Christ and then returns to his Christ-following slave master?  It gets messy. Community was a mess for them and it is a mess for us.  In Colossae, in the church that met at Philemon's house, you had men and women, laborers and wealthy land owners, slaves and slave-masters sitting side by side worshiping the same God.  And, amazingly, they didn't kill each other.  They didn't implode into infighting and bitterness or explode into a hundred different affinity groups. They united together around the person and work of Jesus.  And if they could do it, so can we. Most of Paul's letters are a combination of lesson and lab. ...