Audio Transcript Happy New Year — 2025! — as we launch this podcast into year thirteen. What an amazing ride — all made possible by the grace of God and by your involvement in listening and sending us your questions and praying for us. Thank you for your role in making it all happen. For…
Category: Health
I Want You to Be a Christian Hedonist
I want to talk to you about Christian joy this morning, and I know that on any given Sunday, some are eager for that, and others are not. Perhaps you’re suffering. Perhaps you’re carrying heavy sorrows. I want you to know from the beginning that real Christian joy does not ignore or suppress or sideline…
Outpray God’s Goodness
I wish I could always address God in prayer as Paul did: “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think . . .” (Ephesians 3:20). If I more consistently believed that mine was a God to answer well beyond my asking, I would pray more…
How Healthy Is Your Soul? Six Questions for a New Year
“I will cool you insensibly, by degrees, by little and little.” At the end of one year, on the cusp of another, I remember the words that once haunted the soul of seventeenth-century pastor John Bunyan (1628–1688). He imagined the devil skulking nearby, not as a raging dragon but as a patient and calculating snake,…
‘A Man at Church Thinks We Should Marry — I Disagree’
Audio Transcript Every week, our inbox gets some very interesting scenarios we need to work out together, like this one today from an anonymous young woman. “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for your ministry and for this podcast. My question for you is about how I can respond in faith when someone insists that…
Joy Banishes Burnout: How Pastors Finish Well
Statistics of servants of God who do not end well can be very discouraging. Dr. J. Robert Clinton conducted a now-famous study of how leaders in Scripture finished their tenures. Of those about whom he was able to get sufficient data, Clinton determined that about one in three finished well. Commenting on the contemporary scene,…
Honor Your (Elderly) Parents: How Adult Children ‘Make Some Return’
Recently, I enjoyed reconnecting with a friend from college who is now sixty-something years old (like me) and who cares for her elderly mom (like me). There are a lot of us! This friend described how she and her husband took her mother, a widow in declining health, into their home; they had thought the…
Holy Bravery: How Christian Men Act Like Men
Brothers, how do we obey the command to “be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong” (1 Corinthians 16:13)? How do we who are men act like men? “Act like men” is one word in Greek (andrizomai) — what does it mean? Perhaps it stands as a billboard for the masculine…
Am I Overusing Bible Commentaries?
Audio Transcript I hope you had a wonderful Christmas celebration with friends and family and with your family in the faith. We’re back to work today talking about Bible reading and commentaries in a question from an old friend of ours. “Hello, Pastor John. My name is Calvin from Singapore.” This, by the way, is…
Born to Bring Us Near: Christmas Glories of the Great High Priest
Have you ever asked why God did not send his Son, Jesus Christ — to be born of a virgin, to live a sinless life, to die in the place of sinners, to provide eternal life — two thousand years earlier? When sin entered the world through Adam’s disobedience, and all of us humans ever…