Rethinking Christian Life

Truth and Love: Navigating Sticky Situations

“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ,” Ephesians 4:15 ESV All of us are drowning in sin. Whether we are drowning in ten feet of sin or 1,000 feet, we are all in need of a Savior. The truth is that humans are…

How to Stand Firm When Life Smacks You in the Face

Some news shakes us and seems to tip the Earth off its axis. News like: You have cancer. Your business is in trouble. Your best friend is moving away. Your mom died. News that changes the direction of our lives, slaps us in the face, and wakes us from living on auto-pilot. While the sting of the slap…

Strength, Weakness, and Wrestling

Often life feels like a wrestling match. A grind it out, clinging, pushing, flipping, never-letting-go battle that only ends in sleep and then begins the next day. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.…

Love and Obedience: Do We Really Love God?

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments…” John 14:15 ESV When madly in love a man will bend over backwards to do what pleases his woman. He will write poetry, buy flowers, and even watch NCAA basketball for a whole day even though basketball is not his thing (thanks honey!). In fact when…

The Responsibility of Knowing: Doing Good or Choosing Sin

“So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” James 4:17 ESV Taking care of the less than, the widow, the orphan, the have-nots has always been part of the DNA of God’s people. Part of God’s moral law included not reaping the edges of their…

The Truth About Greed and How to Avoid It

“Greed hides itself from the victim. The money god’s modus operandi includes blindness to your own heart.” Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods (Dutton, 2009), p. 52 Greed: a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed. A selfish and excessive desire for more of something than is needed… So when I selfishly want eat more…

Forgiven: How to Remember the Past without Condemnation

Know, therefore, that the Lord your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness, for you are a stubborn people. Remember and do not forget how you provoked the Lord your God to wrath in the wilderness. From the day you came out of the land of Egypt until you came to this place, you…

Obedience: How to Flourish in Dry Places

When my circumstances seem dry and I feel brittle I always have an excuse for disobedience: I erupted at my husband (There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts Proverbs 12:18a ESV), but I hadn’t slept well the night before and I had a really bad headache. I snapped at my kids (Be angry…

Timing: Delayed Obedience and Grace

Have you ever felt a tug at your heart and were sure God wanted you to do something outside of your comfort zone? Maybe ask that visibly upset person at the grocery store if you could pray for her or ask your hairdresser to go to church with you. And maybe like me you decided…

Winning by Losing: Finding Purpose in God’s Upside-Down Kingdom

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” Jim Elliot Competitive. You can call me that. I don’t like to lose. But winning in God’s kingdom is very different from winning on a basketball court. In God’s Kingdom: …the last will be first, and the first…

Obedience, Running, and Calling

“So don’t throw away your confidence, which has great reward. For you need endurance, so that after you have done God’s will, you may receive what was promised…But we are not those who draw back and are destroyed, but those who have faith and are saved.” Hebrews 10:35-36 and 39 CSB I’ve been silent for…

A Season of Silence: Experiencing God’s Peace

“Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much.” -William Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing Words have been hard for me lately. Silence is easier. I wasn’t so full of joy I could not share like Claudio in the above quote. The big emotions – all of…

The Hope that Does Not Disappoint

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces…

Sovereignty: Three Ways to Trust God When Failure Looms

Last week I watched Clemson trounce Alabama in the NCAA’s Football National Championship game. Clemson was up 31-16 at halftime and never looked back. After a botched fake field goal at the beginning of the third quarter Alabama’s loss seemed imminent. Failure, at least in that game, was coming. Still Alabama did not walk off…

The New, the Not Yet, and the Gone: How to Live Fully When Now is a Struggle

“The struggle is real,” is our snide mantra over laughable “struggles” like not having coffee in the morning. But real struggles do exist. Depression turns just getting out of bed into a war. The struggle for parents to love, guide, discipline, and direct children who want their own way. The battle to overcome addiction. Physical…

Newly Broken: How to Live Fulfilled

2018. A year of breaking. God broke my comfortable world. He called me to teach high school seniors (a leadership class), enroll my kids in the school where I work, and step back into nursing by becoming a school nurse. Nothing felt comfortable. Nothing normal. In the midst of all the change my brokenness became…

Hope and Character: How to Find Lasting Hope

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope… Romans 5:3-4 ESV Character produces hope… I always thought imagination produced hope. Imagination that figures out a way through a difficult situation. Or an imagination that dreams big dreams. But God tells us character…

The Day After: How Hope Changes Everything

But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake…

Depression: How to Explain It to Others

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Psalm 34:18 ESV Looking back I can see it plainly. I was depressed and desperately clinging to my faith. No one from the outside could see it. They knew I injured my foot. They knew my house had to have all the…

New Beginnings: Grace, Growth, and Gratitude

Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. Isaiah 43:19 ESV God is in the business of doing new things in our lives. Why? For our good and His glory. So that this world…

Rethinking Christian Life

Rethinking Challenges, Rethinking Christian Life, Rethinking Faith

Rethinking Christian Life, Rethinking Hard Times

Rethinking Christian Life, Rethinking Gratitude

Get a FREE 9-day Devotional titled Think About Such Things by signing up for my newsletter.