Royal Oak, MI
October 27, 2019 When you have a third kid, you don’t worry about the things you used to with the first kid. JP has a Power Wheels F150 pickup truck; this is one of those plastic toy cars you can drive around the yard. And…
September 22, 2019 In his book The Gift of Forgiveness, Charles Stanley tells the following story: “One of my more memorable seminary professors had a practical way of illustrating to his students the concept of grace. At the end of his evangelism course he would…
September 15, 2019 When I was in elementary school, on the last day of school, we’d have a field day, and the field day ended with a pretty weird tradition, if you think about it; the tug-of-war. This is where you take two groups of…
August 4, 2019 Every year for our anniversary Dan and I go out to a nice restaurant. We rarely go there, in fact one of the only times we ever go there is our anniversary, so much so that the waiter—usually the same guy every…
July 7, 2019 Tim Keller wrote: “You can never break any of the other commandments without breaking the first…idolatry is not one sin among many…all our failures are, at their root, based on idolatry.” Each of us has a guiding principle, an organizing thought behind…
June 23, 2019 When you point your finger at another person, three fingers point back at you. “He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.” ― Sigmund Freud “You are not a Christian because you go to church. If I stand…
June 16, 2019 As we are exploring prayer, and what it means to live by faith, I felt called to go deeper into Paul’s letter to the Romans, the fullest, longest, and deepest of Paul’s letters in its discussion of faith, salvation, and the Christian…
May 26, 2019 The World Christian Encyclopedia cites that there are 33,000 different Christian denominations. When you look at that number, it’s clear it’s kind of inflated—the Encyclopedia counts some groups whose beliefs fall outside mainstream Christianity, and also counts different groups within denominations as…
April 14, 2019 In one of the earlier episodes of the TV series M*A*S*H the doctor known as “Trapper” gets diagnosed with a stomach ulcer. Although initially upset about having to deal with a hole in his gut, Trapper soon beams with joy when his bunkmate Hawkeye…
April 7, 2019 The dancer Martha Graham wrote: “Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.” Habakkuk is not a hero of the Bible we tend to hear much about, like Moses or David or Elijah. Not many Sunday-school songs get written about…