from that self-centered place, she reacts, somehow providing for herself, protecting herself, or exalting herself. Sound familiar? That’s the fate we’re stuck with that is called sin. It happens with every sort of nakedness—physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual. We don’t like to be exposed. We are guarded nearly all the time, but it

Triumph isn’t decades of darkness that finally give way to a single, fleeting moment of light. Triumph is when that moment is the rule, not the exception.

Jesus was born into a divided world that he personally didn’t divide. He didn’t help draw a single one of those lines, but he found a thousand ways to erase them.

The opening of the Bible is written in the style of Hebrew poetry. The point of poetry isn’t to argue about fact and allegory; it’s to tell a story we recognize as true because it so pointedly reveals something true within each reader.

A. W. Tozer famously said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”8

I’ve watched people pray with hearts full of faith for healing and then watch their loved ones die.

Jesus talks constantly about bringing heaven to earth, not getting people to heaven. His mission is not to get you into heaven; it’s to get heaven into you. Read every single recorded sermon in Acts, and you’ll notice a pattern: Not a single one focuses on salvation as a way to escape the fires of hell and book a room in a much more preferable

The modern West has guarded the free expression of the individual more than ever before, and much of that is very, very good. But a by-product is that we live with an inescapable need to prove ourselves. The side effect of a society where you get to invent your own self-worth is a dearth of intimacy. Everyone else becomes a scale I must be weighed

Believer, nonbeliever; seeker, uninterested, or over it and disenfranchised. In-church, ex-church, and no-church. All of us are “searching for enough.”