Theology
The Best Books I Read in 2018
Second to last day in 2018. That means lists. I am going to do a two-parter here. Part 1: the best book I read in 2018. Part 2: a few books you should read in 2019. I love finding out what books people are reading. Novels, non-fiction, theology, cookbooks, books students read to get an…
Read More10 Ways Jesus Claimed to be God
It happens often. The doorbell rings and there are a couple of young men with ties on usually, or an older couple, wanting to tell you about heaven, and how to get there. Usually they are Mormon missionaries or Jehovah’s Witnesses. They, like many religions of the world, believe that Jesus was a good teacher,…
Read MoreWhat Dawkins Gets Wrong – An excerpt from The Problem of God
This is an excerpt from Chapter 2 (The Problem of God’s Existence), from my book The Problem of God: Answering a Skeptic’s Challenges to Christianity (Zondervan, 2017). What does the existence of objective moral values tell us about the universe in which we live? Most fundamentally, Christianity contends they point to the existence of a mind…
Read MoreAre All Religions True?
One of the things modern people often say about different religions is that ‘they are all basically the same’: they teach about being a good person, about a higher being of some sort, but all lead to the same place – just different paths to the same thing. While this position sounds good, we must…
Read MoreHow You Can Change in 2017
This is long post. I like to write four or five paragraph blog posts because I know our attention spans are short, but I also wanted all of this info in one spot. So here is a post that I think will be helpful for the New Year! The best book I read this year…
Read MoreTwo Thoughts on Prayer
The other day I was pondering the deep difference between our public and private lives – loving God in public versus loving God just because he is God. A couple of major ideas hit me around the same time. The first was from Charles Spurgeon. He pointed out that Jesus taught his disciples not to…
Read MoreQ & A Friday: Is there a profile for a church planter?
Hey Mark. I was looking for some advice on church planting. I feel a strong call to plant a church in my city. I was just wondering how do I know if I am called and gifted to start and lead a church? This is a delicate question for two reasons. First, because I don’t…
Read MoreTransformation Trios: how they work & the 15 questions.
In light of another pastor/leader I admired years ago having moral failure and being removed from ministry this week by his church, on Sunday I talked about the accountability that I was pursuing in my personal life to help me grow closer to Jesus devotionally, and to help guard against sin and temptation in my…
Read MoreI may have been reading the Gospels wrong my whole life
So tonight I was reading The Jesus Storybook Bible to my middle daughter. We were reading the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and something hit me I had never thought of (God speaks to us from the most interesting places sometimes doesn’t he)? Sally Lloyd-Jones, the writer of the Storybook Bible, makes the point that Jesus…
Read MoreDebunking myths: the church is against science!
If you go back through history, the church and science were at times at odds with one another; those disagreements, however, have been gravely exaggerated. When atheists speak of the church’s persecution of scientists, we hear stories of people being burned at the stake for scientific theories; we hear about Galileo, Copernicus and Giordano Bruno…
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