As a child, I memorized David’s words in Psalm 119:105 where he writes, “Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light on my path.” (CSB) I always imagined God using His Word like a lighthouse beacon or a floodlight to illuminate the path ahead of me. I ...
Everyone needs encouragement in ministry. Even Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, had Barnabas as an encourager in his life. As we lead others in ministry, we need people to encourage us, but we also need to be encouragers to those we lead. As we look at Jesus’ earthly ministry, we ...
Love that is merely spoken and not married with action is invalid and impotent. For love to be true, our words must match our deeds. We cannot claim to love people and remain unmoved and callous when they encounter suffering, evil, or injustice. Our words regarding loving others sound empty ...
If I'm honest, when there's a crowd on Sunday, I'm pumped! Where there isn't, I'm in the dumps. It's frustrating, and an area where God has been working on me. I don't know that I can peg anything sinfully wrong with being excited about a spike in attendance, but I ...
At Mayhill Baptist, where I have served as pastor since March 2017, I preach verse-by-verse through books of the Bible. One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is the timeliness of every text for every Sunday. Pericopes planned months or even years ahead seem to land on a ...
In Romans 12:1-2, Paul exhorts us to present ourselves as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual worship. But what does it look like to live that way? Later in the same chapter of Romans, we see a great description that helps to answer that question. In this ...
As an alumnus of Dallas Baptist University, "servant leadership" was a phrase I heard from 2002 to 2006. In fact, I believe we even had an entire class devoted to it. Further, we had a statue of Jesus washing a disciple's feet on campus, and even our welcome activities as ...
There are multiple accounts in the Bible of Jesus feeding thousands of men, women, and children with only a small amount of food (Matthew 14, Mark 6, Luke 9, John 6). When we hear these accounts from Scripture, we often focus on the fact that what He did was miraculous, and ...
Forgive is one of the most powerful words and verbs in the English language. The power lies behind the act of not holding a grudge against another person, but to release resentment against the individual and to pardon him/her for the wrong they did. When we hold on to bitterness ...
Recently my teenage children had the experience of learning about scuba diving from their cousin. She took each of them into the pool with a tank on their back and taught them how to use the respirator to breathe in the oxygen from the tank. While she was teaching them how to ...
