Anything that cools the flames of love, John Wesley said, that is what ‘the world’ is. The little phrase has stayed with me all week. For in our approach to passages like the following, we often treat the world as if we’ve mastered its deception, and in this posture we forget both the subtly of […]
I’m moved again by the young girl from Bethany, pouring her costly perfume of spikenard over Him just days before His death. She knew who He was. And her response alone showed Him the extravagance fitting for His identity, while the brothers ‘round called it waste (Jn. 12:1-8; Mk, 14:3-9). To the One who once […]
The more I grow in loving and knowing Jesus, the more I see how utterly dependent I am upon His upholding of my heart. I cannot keep my own heart alive. Every point of progress and each forward movement is marked and undergirded by His tenacity over me – His zeal that I would be […]
While in the heights of the Colorado mountains last week, I wrote… It was the smallest little aspen tree that just rebuked me, and took my heart by surprise by its soft scolding. As I watched it avail itself to the breeze, leaves whipping to and fro so vulnerably, the message came so clearly to […]
We were made for a story and the human heart longs and yearns to play a deep and lasting role in a grand epic tale. Each of us not only wants to hear the story, we not only want to know the story; we want to participate in it and to give our lives with […]
Jesus’ familiarity with suffering was deeply married to His foreignness to sin. When He who was Love incarnate stood amidst the crowds of His day, He was without sin and thus without the root system of pride and arrogance. When the woman beside Him scoffed a mocking statement, He did not look at her and […]