What if I told you there was a process and no matter how much you blew up your life, if you used this process, there would be a way to come out the other side whole? Well, here it is. It’s what the Bible calls repentance. You say, “You mean just sayi...
We need every bit of help we can get to learn to pray, “Thy will be done,” because we’re going right into the teeth of our culture. The essence of American culture is the belief that the more free we are to decide for ourselves, the happier we’ll be...
What does it mean to pray, “Thy kingdom come”? Jesus gave us his instruction on how to pray in the Lord’s Prayer, and it’s filled with concepts you need to know from the rest of the Bible. There are two places—Matthew 5 and Luke 6—where Jesus tells...
Hallowed is an old English word that means to treat something as sacred. It means to be captivated, astonished, melted with grateful joy for who God is and what he has done. For many years, I felt I didn’t know how to praise God, because nobody ever...
What does it mean to pray, “Our Father”? It’s much more complicated than you think. Everything Jesus Christ came to do—the reason he came, the purpose of his salvation—was that we might receive adoption. We can pray “Our Father” because we’ve been a...
If you’re going to deal with the brutal realities of life, the writer of Hebrews says you have to have shepherds in your life. Hebrews is written to people whose lives are filled with problems. And here, in the last passage of Hebrews, the writer tel...
When you embrace God by faith two things come into your life: a transforming power and a deep tension. It’s a duality. If you try to resolve the deep tension, you lose the transforming power. The writer of Hebrews says the great believers in history...
This passage in Hebrews seems like an anti-climax. Throughout the book, the writer gives us something to help us face the brutal realities of life. But then, Hebrews 13 seems different. At first it looks like a to-do list, like miscellaneous ethical...
Hebrews was written to people who have been shaken by life. Difficulties and sufferings have shaken them to the core. The writer is trying to help them find ways to face the brutal realities of life, to stand solid when everything around them is fal...
There’s never been a culture with a lower pain threshold than ours. There’s never been a culture that gave us fewer resources for dealing with the brutal realities of life and death than ours. The writer of Hebrews wants his readers to understand ho...
Hebrews is written to help us have what it takes to face the difficulties of life. And in chapter 11, we’re told one of the keys is to be people of faith. But what is faith? In our cultural moment, conservatives see faith as a moral virtue, while lib...
The book of Hebrews is written to people who are so beaten down with troubles that they’re ready to give up. The writer is trying to give the readers what they need to handle the brutal realities of life in this world. In Hebrews 11, he gives us som...
When modern people hear that God requires blood to turn aside his wrath from sin, it sounds offensive. It sounds disgusting, primitive, obscene. Christianity has sometimes been called the religion of the slaughterhouse. It doesn’t seem to be what we...
Jesus Christ did not come to start a new religion. He didn’t come to start the best religion. He came to end religion. Every religion has its extremists. Religion causes an enormous amount of conflict and strife in this world. What are we going to do...
To be able to handle life, there’s nothing more practical than to know that Jesus is your advocate. This isn’t just an abstract doctrinal issue. Because this whole book of Hebrews is written not as a theological treatise, but as a piece of intense pa...
