Sublime

Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.

He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marveled at the bitterness, the terror, the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when

Perhaps this is what pastoral ministry is supposed to look like? Maybe applying the gospel to those in the holes they keep falling into is the mission. Or part of it, anyway. Jesus says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23), so we should expect that every day feels like death

“On reflection,” confesses Eugene Peterson, “I realized that I had become busy, a bastard form of ambition.”

God can give and God can take away. Will we trust the increase or curse the decrease, or will we say, “Blessed be the name of the LORD?” The way we are typically programmed to measure the success of our ministries sets us up for hollow victory and desperate failure. But this is not to say we should never do any measuring. It is only to say that