The ultimate purpose of our gifts is to love one another, not to love ourselves. Paul is encouraging us to reflect on our own motives in serving and make sure that we are using our gifts to serve God and His Church.

I want to challenge how we decide the worth of a year, and I believe it has more to do with our focus than the events…

Everything we've seen, read or experienced in life up to this point has formed our perspective. This leads us to have certain expectations about the future. If there’s one thing the past few years have taught us, it’s that change, like death and taxes, is inevitable…

I thought I was fine. I went to Church, I read the scripted prayers, I sang the hymns, and I read my bible... sometimes. The problem was, that I didn't care…

I don’t know about you, but forgiveness is pretty high up there in the commands I tend to fail easiest at. So hard that it’s even taken years. It’s impossible at times to forgive those who've deeply wounded you…

When we do not consistently preach the gospel to our hearts, selective memory takes over and produces passive Christianity. Meditation on the gospel should not be done in fear of losing our salvation - nothing can separate us from the love of Christ (Romans 8:31-39)! Rather, letting the gospel truth repeatedly wash over our hearts and minds has everything to do with keeping ourselves aligned with the heart of our Father.

Join me for this 46 day study of the Gospel and Christ’s resurrection. Complete with daily readings to guide your study and questions to provoke your thinking…

If you’re like me, there are places in your bible that you’ve read and heard several times (i.e. the gospels, Genesis 1-11, and the popular Psalms). However, there are those dark spots in your bible – whole books you’ve never touched. For me, those were books like Ezekiel, 1 & 2 Chronicles, and those "deep cut" Psalms you wouldn’t see cross-stitched on a pillow.

Finally, I was out of the riptide and back on my feet, standing in chest-deep water after what seemed like forever. I was exhausted. I didn’t know it but Jill had jumped in too and, as I looked to my right, she was in the riptide now and struggling hard toward the beach. In spite of her best swimming, she was moving steadily backward toward the open ocean and would be out of reach any second. My first instinct was to swim over to her as fast as I could…