I have a love hate relationship with mountain climbing. While I enjoy the phenomenal views from the top, the grueling climb deters me. I once tackled Mount Kenya with a friend. We started among the shambas1 of Chogoria and spent two days climbing toward the peaks. Around 11,000 feet I began to suffer from altitude […]
One of the most helpful workshops I ever attended began with a bird house. A consultant for a multinational oil company visited our humble missions base and donated a hundred thousand dollars worth of training over two intensive days. If you want to build a bird house, begin at the end—draw a picture of what […]
Forget your carefully manicured understanding of Good Friday for a moment. Close your mind to hindsight and step back to that grizzly day, almost two thousand years ago. From heaven’s perspective, Jesus died as a sacrifice for the sin of the world; but from the perspective of everyone except His followers, Jesus was crucified because […]
What do you look for in a loaf of bread? When I’m in a new store, I go straight for the whole-wheat selection. After I find a suitably priced loaf, I check the list of ingredients to make sure there is no barley included, because I’m allergic to barley. Perhaps you are more concerned to […]
What’s the shelf life of a disciple of Jesus? Are you set up to stay fresh and useful to Jesus for life or will you become stale, or sour before the end? The first thing that it depends on is whether we are following the real King Jesus. If we run after Jesus with a […]
If anyone is thirsty, let Him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, “From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water” (John 7:37–38) Cisterns can be impressive. The cistern at King Herod’s winter palace of Masada held a million gallons. Theoretically, that is enough water for […]
Occasionally I bite off more than I can chew when it comes to hiking. The sun sets before I get back to camp. I finish the hike, in the dark, with just a tiny flashlight to show the way. But it always amazes me how effective that light is. It reminds me of another of […]
You know the warning, “Don’t talk to strangers.” It was drilled into you as a child and you probably repeated it to your children. So it comes as quite a surprise that four men, to whom Jesus was almost a stranger, did more than talk to Jesus—they went off with Him. John and Luke’s versions […]
Do you know that we freeze-dry people? What I mean is that we only see them as they were when we first knew them; we struggle to accept that God changes people. Our image of them is stiff and brittle. When a new reality in someone’s life challenges our inflexible view, the image shatters and […]
Matthew’s account of Jesus’ ministry immediately after the Sermon on the Mount reads like a firework display of miracles. The multitudes that had marveled at His authoritative teaching followed Him and saw the practical extent of that authority. Right there, at the foot of the mountain, a leper came to Him and bowed down before […]