If I could only read one book series for the rest of my life, it would be a close tie between J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and the seven books that make up C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. Fortunately, I haven’t had to choose, and I go back…

The opening prayer of our funeral liturgy includes these words: “O Lord, You are always more ready to hear us than we are to pray; and You know our needs before we ask, and our ignorance in asking.” As the years have gone by, I have found these words an ever…

Treasured Friends, One thought I have been pondering this Easter season is that ours is not the first age to have found the resurrection of Jesus Christ a challenge to our assumptions.  C.S. Lewis wrote about the danger of “chronological snobbery,” that proud assumption that every generation is necessarily smarter…

Treasured Friends, Recently I found myself reminiscing about an old fishing buddy: we’ll call him “Jim.”  When I met him, Jim had only recently retired from a long career as a high school history teacher.  He’d taught at the same school, lived in the same community, been married to the…

Said the Puritan, Ralph Venning, the truly sinful thing about sin is its utter, unquenchable, and relentless desire to be opposed to God.  What God calls good, sin calls evil.  What God calls wrong, sin calls right.  What God says “do,” sin says “ignore.”  What makes it sin is its…

Treasured Friends, With the Presidential election now decided, we are likely to hear over the coming weeks and months about the new administration’s “mandate.”  Our system of government affords each presidential administration a certain degree of latitude – a “mandate” – to cast a vision for the nation’s near-term direction…

Treasured Friends, On All Hallow’s Eve (Halloween) in 1517, when an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther posted his “95 Theses” on the door of the local castle in Wittenberg, Germany, he merely hoped for the opportunity to engage in a debate.  What he could not have fathomed was the far…

Treasured Friends, It is notable both in Scripture and in life how often calamity, crisis, and uncertainty are the result of our unwillingness to accept limits and boundaries. Adam and Eve were handed all the lush beauty and bounty of Eden, but immediately sought to have the one part of…

“All Scripture is God-breathed, and is therefore useful for teaching, correcting, rebuking, and training in righteousness so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” – 2 Timothy 3:16-17 There is no shortage of passages in Scripture that will make us wonder, “why on earth…

Treasured Friends, “He who is the glory of Israel does not lie or change His mind; for He is not a human being, that He should change His mind.”  So go the words of 1 Samuel 15:29.  King Saul has put the final nail in the coffin of his kingship,…