Only the knowledge of unconditional love can motivate lasting, inward change. I’ve seen this reality in a new light in the last six months of marriage. I never realized I could feel so safe, so loved, so secure in a relationship. Yet, far from that sense of security making me careless about my actions, knowing…

The music practice was chaos. I always enjoy sitting in the back row of the church, watching my husband and the team practice. But today, I could only shake my head. Our worship leader was running around, switching out chords to fix a broken system while the soft-spoken sound guy helplessly tried to get the…

Joy is a central theme of Christmas — yet, as we all experience, real joy often comes with a fight. When things aren’t going our way, disappointment or even tragedy strikes, it forces us to decide: will we choose true joy or discard it as impossible? It depends on our source. Trouble reveals what we…

“I love to work for God in the daytime, and at night to lie down under his smiles,” Sarah Edwards (wife of theologian Jonathan Edwards) once commented.  What a beautiful statement! And yet, for several years, I struggled with it. I desperately wanted to be able to say I felt God smiling at me, and…

Anticipation is the best part of Christmas, at least for a child. Half of the wonder and joy of it all is counting down the days, seeing the presents pile up under the tree, and preparing — all for that one day.  Our Christian hope is a lot like that, only Christmas day ends while…

I love Dicken’s Christmas Carol for it’s heartwarming story, words that leap out of the book and invite you to cozy up near the fire, with the Christmas tree lit, and escape into “the spirit of Christmas” — complete with a cup of tea. But for all my love for the classic story, it hands…

I have often wondered why, if Jesus promised He was the Living Water that always satisfied, unmet desires didn’t go away the moment I was saved. After all, didn’t Jesus tell the woman at the well that “whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again” (John 4:14)? Why…

The great preacher of the 20th century Martin Lloyd-Jones called it “the acropolis of the Bible” — the high city of Athens that served as the pinnacle of the ancient world. Or in more modern language, it’s “the most important paragraph in the entire Bible, the innermost meaning of the cross.” What they’re referring to…

I vividly remember my eight- or nine-year old little sister coming up to me one day. “What does propitiation mean?” she asked. I thought it was really cute, because she was so small to be thinking about such a big word! And I guess since I was the oldest (even though I was only a…

You have to wonder what John was thinking when he first pointed to Jesus, his then unknown cousin, and declared “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Of course, John, as the last Old Covenant prophet, carried divine inspiration in those words like the rest of the Old Testament…