Dear Friends,

Many of you attended the Kingdom Advisors Annual Conference last month. Our worship leader, Marty Goetz, sang a song that puts one of my favorite verses to music. The verse is, “So teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12, NASB)

I love this verse because it reminds me of the gift of and importance of today. Only the Lord knows the number of my days in their entirety, but I can recognize and act on the specific ...

Dear Friends:

There is an old song by the late Rich Mullins which says, “there’s a wideness in God’s mercy I cannot find in my own, and it keeps its fire burning to melt this heart of stone – keeps me aching, with a yearning - keeps me glad to have been caught in the reckless raging fury that they call the love of God.” 

Sometimes the love of God in our lives feels reckless and raging. We encounter relationships or circumstances that offend our sense of justice, and we look ...

Dear Friends,

I always spend a lot of time in reflection at the beginning of the year. It’s helpful for me to review the past year and to set my focus on intentionally growing in certain areas in the coming year. Reflection for its own sake can breed selfishness or pride or self-pity. Instead, God asks us to reflect with Christ in mind. In Philippians 2:5, Paul exhorts the Christ-follower to consider Jesus’ example of humility and obedience as we fashion and fix our own attitude toward the relationships and responsibilities in the coming ...

Dear Friends,

Today I am grateful for my Savior. The world is a hurried, painful, and sometimes confusing place. It is so good to know that He humbled Himself and made a way for me to enter into to the rest, health, and clarity of a relationship with my Creator and Father. As I write to you and ponder John 14:6 again today, I thought it would be an encouragement to you to consider a few verses that speak more fully to Jesus being the way, the truth, and the life.

...

Dear Friends:

It is the season of Advent. Two weeks ago, on Sunday, we lit the first Advent candle, which stands for hope. As I think about the quote by Oswald Chambers, “God does not give us overcoming life, but life as we overcome,” I am struck by the need for hope in our overcoming.

Hope, which is synonymous with desire, expectation, and belief, indicates that we are actively holding onto something that we neither see nor possess in the moment. Hope, in our Christian walk, joins faith and ...

Dear Friends:

The world is very small. When I turn on the news or load CNN.com on my computer, I see images from every continent…all of them fresh within the last week…each of them portraying ugly truths that are frequently hard to embrace.

We live in occupied territory. Paul said in Ephesians 6:12, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

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Dear Friends,

I pray you are well. Over the last few weeks as my wife, Judy, and I have walked through a season of physical challenge (she had surgery for a badly broken arm), I have had more and more honest prayer before the Lord…prayer that He would help me to walk each day as Jesus walked and love those around me as Jesus loved. It is humbling to encounter our own frailty when we are faced with challenges.

Often, though, our frailty brings us back to God’s perspective ...

Dear Friends,

Today, I want to share with you a few excellent “remember” and “forget” scriptures, as an encouragement to you in your walk with the Lord.

REMEMBER:

“But you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and that the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I am commanding you to do this thing. When you reap your harvest in your field and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be for ...

Dear Friends,

Have you ever stopped to observe tiny creatures for a period of time? A spider spinning her web? An ant carrying his food on his back? A hummingbird drinking his fill from a red plastic feeder? When observing such things, it is easy to be amazed at the intricate nature of life, even among the smallest creatures. On the other hand, it is also very easy for us (as humans) to chuckle at how the particular creature we are watching is oblivious to the wider world. The spider does not know that ...

Dear Friends,

I have just finished reading Ken Follett’s most recent book, Fall of Giants. It chronicles the origins and the outcome of World War I by tracing several different families – American, German, Russian, British, and Welsh. The book enumerates on the vast wealth of upper class European and American families in contrast with the grinding poverty of the working class poor during the early part of the 20th century. In true Follett style, there are several key reversals of fortune, and by the end of the novel, a few of the characters ...