James’s one sentence — “Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away” (James 4:14) — contains within it both the greatest urgency and the most clarifying perspective…
Jeremiah’s word stands over every human plan: “It is not in man who walks to direct his steps.” The honest acknowledgment of limitation is not weakness — it is the first movement of wisdom. Pride is constitutionally blind to limitation. It is the nature of pride…
Jesus was “a man of sorrows” — and he was also a man of deep, unshakable joy. The New Testament does not present these as contradictions. It presents them as dimensions of the same great soul. The church has a long tradition of depicting Jesus primarily…
True liberty is not the freedom to do anything — it is the freedom to do what is right within the boundaries that God has set. Every servant of God, from Christ himself down to the local preacher, operates within those limits. The word “liberty” is…
The parable Jesus told to a lawyer who did not want the truth has embedded in it the three fundamental orientations toward other people — and only one of them is the philosophy of Jesus. Most people consider themselves to be in the third category —…
The New Testament is the inspired Word of God because Christ, who possessed all authority, delegated it to the apostles, and the Holy Spirit guaranteed the accuracy and completeness of their record. Some people accept the Old Testament as inspired by God but hold the New…
The last words of Scripture before the benediction are not a command, a condemnation, or a prophecy — they are an invitation, and that invitation is deliberately open to anyone who will come. The book of Revelation closes with a scene of cosmic completion: the new…
Jesus lived an ideal life in an unideal world — and it required courage at every level: with friends who needed correcting, enemies who sought his death, and false teachers who controlled the institutions of his day. He did not live an easy life. He was…
“Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwelling places” (John 14:1-2). Jesus said that on the night He was betrayed, to people who were about to watch everything they thought they understood fall…
“It is well to tell the sick of a physician; the poor of riches; the dying of life; the lost of a Savior; and the impenitent of hell.” The opening line is exactly right. This is not a subject a preacher enjoys. But silence on hell…