Praising the God Who Takes Away

Praising the God Who Takes Away

It’s easy to praise the God who gives you what you ask for. The God who opens doors of opportunity for you. The God who pours down blessings on you from the windows of heaven. The God who silences your enemies and builds a protective hedge around you and bears you up...
The Enemy of Holiness

The Enemy of Holiness

How do you make something holy? Trick question—you can’t. You can keep something holy, like the Sabbath. God told us to “remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8).Once every seven days, we make an effort to maintain the holiness of the 24 hours God that...
Belonging to the Way

Belonging to the Way

Before they were known as Christians, the early followers of Jesus Christ were identified as “belonging to the Way” (Acts 9:2, ESV). I love that. It was a path and a way of life. This strange new sect of Judaism was marked by the way the disciples lived. What about...
A big ol’ box of air

A big ol’ box of air

I’m big into board games. If you know me, this is no surprise. Even if you don’t know me, it’s probably not much of a surprise. I’ve already shoehorned it into at least one Sabbath Thought, and this probably won’t be the last time, either. A good board game gives you...
The hand that wrote this

The hand that wrote this

The year was 1089. A scribe sat down to finish his current project: a handwritten copy of the gospel accounts in Greek. He wasn’t the first to do it, and he wasn’t the last. He was a single link in a chain stretching back nearly a thousand years before his birth, and...