“The sins we do not forget, God does not remember.”
All in Sinner and Saint
One question I hear a lot is whether “sinner” is an appropriate term to describe a Christian? After all, didn’t Paul refer to Christians as saints? Once God saves us, aren’t we new creatures? The old (sinner) is gone, and the new (saint) has come?” These are important questions…
Almost everyone gets it, one way or the other. And I don’t mean “gets it” in the sense of understanding something. I mean “gets it” in the sense of getting-it-between-the-eyes. Almost everyone gets the big hurt; and, in the words of The Doors, “almost no one here gets out alive.” Whether you say of your experience…
My friend Jacob Smith once suggested that all human beings are three bad days in a row from becoming a tabloid headline, and most of us are already on day two. At a time when our worst private moments, most shameful secrets, and deepest character flaws can be easily found out and publicly exposed for the whole world…
My wife and I see a lot of movies. But our favorite movie of the last year or so is—without question—The Darkest Hour, featuring the Academy Award-winning performance of Gary Oldman playing Winston Churchill. There are so many things about this film that my wife and I love, but there is one scene in particular…
A couple of months back, I was driving my daughter Genna (16) to her mom’s. We both love music and we both like to listen to it loud. We always have fun in my car enjoying our favorite songs together. At one point during our two-hour drive, I looked over and Genna was crying. I turned the music down and asked…
At a dinner one evening, my friend Dr. Rod Rosenbladt told me a true story of how he’d wrecked his car when he was sixteen years old. Rod had been drinking, and in fact, he and his friends were all drunk. After the accident, Rod called his dad, and the first thing his dad asked him was, “Are you all right?” Rod assured him that he…
Growing up, I loved Christmas. It was, by far, my favorite time of year. I loved the presents and the music and the lights and the chaos and the traditions and the decorations and the shopping and the Christmas movies and the food. I loved it all. But more than anything, I loved being with my…
The primary purpose of the Law is to show us our sin and God’s hatred of it. The Law exposes our failure, and it diagnoses our disease. It reveals God’s perfect will and our inability to keep it. The Law is good, but it is ruthless. It demands everything but gives nothing. The Law cannot produce in us what…
Many of you already know this (though some of you may not), but I used to be a pastor. Some would even say a successful pastor. I was leading a large church that serves a college-prep school and a seminary, writing a book a year, traveling extensively all over the country to speak at conferences…
Whatever bad stuff you may have read or heard about me, whether it is true or false, this I can tell you for sure: I am way worse than anyone knows. In fact, I am certain that if all my sins (thoughts, words, and deeds) over the last four decades were broadcast universally, the only person who would still love…
Growing up in the church around mostly “good” people and “good” families, broken families were seen as “less than.” Families with a track record of teenage pregnancies, multiple marriages and divorces, affairs, addiction issues, step children, half-siblings, and so on, were examples of what to spend your life avoiding…
