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 […]

Best of All – God Is with Us

One night after teaching, a guy approached me wanting to talk. We sat down, and he told me how each night Jesus comes to visit him in a spaceship. He insisted that Jesus is a white guy with palm trees protruding from his scalp. I of course told him that Jesus is Jewish and that […]

Gospel and Holiness

Before the apostle Paul challenged believers in Romans 6:12 to “not let sin reign in their bodies,” he reminded them of the gospel and connected the imperative of personal holiness to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Paul’s point was, “Your sin was crucified and buried with Christ. Why would you want to live […]

Our Part in Transformation

 “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (II Corinthians 3:18 NIV). The apostle Paul takes us back to the scene where the Lord gave Moses the new stone tablets. During that encounter, God […]

Motivation for Service

The gospel is not only the foundation for our service; it also radically purifies our motivation for service. In fact, serving others for reasons other than the gospel actually doesn’t make a lot of sense because of the philosophical contradictions beneath the surface. Take, for example, the predominant worldview of Western culture today—the worldview of […]

Check Your Mark

Deuteronomy 15:12, 16-17 reads: If a fellow Hebrew, a man or a woman, sells himself to you and serves you six years, in the seventh year you must let him go free. But if your servant says to you, “I do not want to leave you,” because he loves you and your family and is […]

Gospel and Others

In the research behind Transformational Discipleship we discovered that people are more likely to grow when godly leaders apply the truth of the gospel to their hearts. Instead of only teaching the commands found in Scripture, leaders who view discipleship through the lens of the gospel bring people to God’s grace as the foundation for […]