Spiritual Warfare

I was recently introduced to a term I wasn’t quite familiar with. Progressive Christianity. Encouraged to listen to Alisa Childers (a former CCM recording artist) on a Podcast hosted by Impact 360, I was able to draw a quick conclusion and decided to share my findings with you. Impact 360 is an organization that equips high school graduates and teens, of this current generation (Gen Z), to be change agents in the world for Jesus. This podcast focused on the current…

It’s fine to pray for safety and blessings, but what if you want more? What if you desire power? In 1 Corinthians 10:13, Paul says that God provides us an escape route whenever we are tempted. But what happens when we refuse to take the help and instead implement our own ideas? Eventually, our human strength fails, and we give in to temptation. So it was with King David. He’d experienced the Lord’s rescue countless times, but he still allowed temptation to…

There are few things more crucial to us than our own lives. And there are few things we are less clear about. This journey we are taking is hardly down the yellow brick road. Then again, that's not a bad analogy at all. We may set out in the light, with hope and joy, but eventually, our path always seems to lead us through dark woods, shrouded with a low-lying mist. Where is this abundant life that Christ supposedly promised? Where is God when we need him most? What is…

We are the sons and daughters of God, even more, the Beloved, pursued by God himself. We might think that, having our heart and mind bolstered by these images of beauty and truth, we would live our lives with courage and energy that arise out of the exuberant hope we have in the future. But there is another voice that whispers in our ear a very different message: a message in a minor and condemning key; a key that dilutes or even erases the truths John has portrayed so.…

When we are engaged in the work God has called us to do in the world, some level of persecution is inevitable. For William Wilberforce, who had chosen to make abolition of the powerful slave trade the “Great Object” of his life, the persecution was intense. Wilberforce had every reason to be afraid for his life. During his decades-long fight to end slavery, multiple slave-ship captains threatened Wilberforce’s life. One even challenged him to a duel. As…

We are now in the late stages of the long and vicious war against the human heart. I know—it sounds overly dramatic. I almost didn't use the term "war" at all, for fear of being dismissed at this point as one more in the group of "Chicken Littles," Christians who run around trying to get everybody worked up over some imaginary fear in order to advance their political or economic or theological cause. But I am not hawking fear at all; I am…

Our Enemy is a thief, and of all the precious things he has stolen from our hearts, his worst act of treachery has been to steal our future from us. He has stolen all the magic and promise and wonder of the happily ever after. Very few of us live with hope. To those without faith, he has whispered, "Your story ends with an accident, and then...there is nothing. This is as good as it gets." Small wonder people drink too much, eat too much, watch too much TV,…

I read an email this morning and clicked the forward button to send it to a dear friend. He’ll love this one, I said to myself…… until I realized. He went home to be with the Lord on December 27th. My heart ached again. Not for him, he’s having a great time. But for me, I’ll miss him. The third person in my circle of either close friends or once close friends died just a couple of days ago, one succumbing to complications brought on by the.…

Joseph Lister, the nineteenth-century medic, is known as ‘the father of antiseptic surgery’. Lister was disturbed by the high proportion of patients who died from post-operative infections. He became convinced that infinitesimal microbes, invisible to the naked eye, were causing the infections. He began to develop a number of antiseptic solutions with which to treat the wounds. Sure enough, the proportion of patients dying from infections decreased. In a similar,…