God Includes You
We include our friends in our plans, in our lives. When someone gives you great seats to a game, you think of friends you can invite. When Memorial Day or Labor Day rolls around, you include your friends in the plans for the cookout. Jesus declares that as His friend, you know the Father’s business […]
God Shows His Greatness
When something great happens in our lives, we call our friends. If we have great news to share, we tell people we love. Moses enjoyed a close friendship with God, and God showed Moses His greatness. The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend. . . . […]
Our Identity As Children
Romans 8:14-16 says, All those led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father!” The Spirit Himself testifies together with our spirit that we are God’s children. The phrase […]
Not Only Servants
In John 13, Jesus washes His disciples’ feet, holding high the value of serving. He challenges them to embrace their identity as servants. Moments later Jesus tells His disciples that they are more than servants. He calls them friends. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. […]
Living Our Identity
Our identity in Christ necessitates rejecting an identity built on something else, on something less. In the research behind Transformational Discipleship, believers consistently showed that they know this to be the case. When asked about denying selfish impulses, believers expressed their understanding of the privilege of living a new and transformed life. Transformation is seen […]
The Spiritual Discipline That Impacts Everything
In our research behind Transformational Discipleship, we discovered that engagement in one particular spiritual discipline positively impacts engagement in every other spiritual discipline (giving, serving, sharing the gospel, fasting, praying, etc.). In other words, while the other spiritual disciplines are important, engagement in one of these (from a research vantage point) does not necessarily increase […]
Righteous Frustration
In their now classic work, The Leadership Challenge, Kouzes and Posner wrote, “More than anything else, leadership is about creating a new way of life. Leaders must accept the responsibility for making change happen.” Leadership and change are inexorably related. When God raises a leader for a task, He often burdens that leader with righteous frustration. There […]
Dinner with God
While on this earth, Jesus spent a lot of time at a house in Bethany where two sisters, Mary and Martha lived. One day Jesus visited for dinner. As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a […]
Discipleship and Identity
The apostle Peter viewed discipleship, in part, through the lens of identity in Christ. When he wrote the epistle of 1 Peter, he was writing a group of Christians who were struggling with how to live in the world as they were experiencing intense persecution. The root of the hostility toward them was the fire that […]
Example and Highest End
We must be careful not to teach people that the ultimate goal of Christianity is serving. Jesus is the ultimate goal, the highest end. Our serving must ultimately be grounded in Him, and for Him, our hearts deeply tuned toward Him. We are incapable of serving for the right reasons, incapable of making any impact […]