When you genuinely strive toward faithfulness in your leadership, friendships, counseling situations, or evangelistic opportunities, you can’t shake the discouragement when those to whom you minister meet you with blank stares or hard hearts. While working toward faithfulness, every Christian will come to a point where they feel they are failing. Disappointment often follows when…
This weekend, pastors and preachers around the world will exert significant effort to explain the good news of Jesus (i.e. the gospel). They’ll do so knowing that a lot of people in the pews have never believed the gospel and may not hear the gospel again until next Christmas or Easter when they return to…
Recently I posted an article arguing for the idea of multiplication. That is, as Christians we are called to make disciples (Matt 28:18–20). We hope the disciples we make will, in turn, make other disciples. In short, multiplication = disciples making more disciples. I’m not going to rehash that argument. If you are interested, you…
Sometimes I joke around about Christians taking over the world. That’s tongue and cheek, but I do believe we want to get as many people on the right side of history as we can. What I mean by that idea, getting “people on the right side of history,” is simply that we desire to persuade…
I have been a part of the Southern Baptist Convention for all of my life. But I don’t think I’ve ever known what it means to be Southern Baptist until this past week as I attended my first Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting. Seeing its representatives, all 10,000 of them, together in one place afforded…
Have you ever thought of waging spiritual warfare with a butter knife? Paul explains in 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 that the spiritual warfare of gospel ministry is all about tearing down the resistance in people’s hearts to the captivating truth and beauty of Christ. What that resistance is changes throughout time and culture. In Paul’s day,…
Though it is common to assert women speak more words a day than men, it appears more likely that men and women use a similar amount of words per day.* Regardless of whether or not that’s true, our words are not few. I’m reminded today that all of my words matter, particularly when it comes…
