The Blog

There's a particular kind of heaviness that comes from watching something sacred get trampled and feeling like there's nothing you can do about it. Corruption wins the headline. Cruelty gets the upper hand. The people who should be held accountable aren't. If you've ever walked away from the news, or just your own life, wondering whether anyone is actually in control of any of this, Daniel 8 was written for exactly that moment. Daniel receives another vision — this one set fu

Somewhere along the way, many men picked up the idea that masculinity means being tough, emotionally unshakable, independent, and perpetually in control. Never let them see you sweat. Never admit you are confused. Never cry. And whatever you do, don't sing too enthusiastically at church. Someone might think you've lost your man card. But what if some of the very things men are tempted to hide are the qualities that make them trustworthy, compelling, and genuinely attractive?

Most churches would say they want to make disciples. We preach the Great Commission, offer Bible studies, organize small groups, and encourage people to grow spiritually. These are often good and necessary activities. Yet an important question remains: Are we actually helping people become disciples who intentionally help others follow Jesus? A church can be busy with religious activity while remaining largely passive in disciple-making. People may attend faithfully, acquire

Spend five minutes with the news some mornings and it doesn't take much imagination to feel like the ground is moving. Headlines shift by the hour. Institutions that felt permanent a few years ago suddenly don't. It's easy to walk away from a newsfeed with a low hum of dread you can't quite name — the sense that something larger than you is in motion, and nobody's entirely sure where it's headed. Daniel knew that feeling too, just with far stranger imagery attached to it. Aft

The final twenty or thirty minutes of your day should not automatically belong to your phone. For most of us, they do. The dishes are done, the kids are (finally) down, and we sink into bed with a glowing rectangle a few inches from our face. One more email. One more video. One more scroll through someone else's highlight reel. Then we look up, and it is 11:47. This post is not a rant against technology. Phones are tools, and good ones. I use mine to read Scripture, call my f

Ever notice how a pilot stays steady in a crosswind? The plane gets pushed sideways by the wind, and the pilot has to keep fighting to keep the nose aligned with the runway. From inside the cabin, it can feel unstable — like something's wrong. But pilots will tell you the opposite is true. That tension is proof the pilot is staying on course. The moment they stop resisting and just "go with the flow" of the wind, the plane drifts off the runway entirely. That's a strange plac

We live in a culture that has become remarkably skilled at avoiding suffering. We medicate discomfort, eliminate inconvenience, maximize efficiency, and organize much of life around personal preference. Even Christianity can quietly absorb these assumptions. We can begin to imagine that faithfulness means God will make our lives increasingly comfortable, our circumstances increasingly manageable, and our problems increasingly solvable. But the New Testament offers a radically

Fiction Once Upon a Wardrobe by Patti Callahan // This book was fantastic. Callahan is a fantastic writer. My wife read this and I refused to pick it up because it looked like one of those books only a women would read (I know, I know - calm down). I was wrong. It's a great book that I enjoyed and would recommend to anyone. The quotes, “reason is how we get to the truth, but imagination is how we find meaning” and “every human interaction is eternally important” are still sit

Melchizedek appears in Scripture for three verses, speaks two sentences, and vanishes. Yet the Holy Spirit returns to him a thousand years later in a royal psalm, and again a thousand years after that in the longest sustained argument of the New Testament's most theologically dense letter. Few biblical characters receive so little narrative and so much theological weight. That imbalance has made Melchizedek a magnet for speculation. He has been called an angel, a heavenly red

Most of us have a version of the party. Not a literal banquet with gold goblets and a thousand guests, just the noise we turn up when something underneath our lives feels unsteady. Busyness. Scrolling. Staying ahead of the to-do list. If we can just keep moving, keep optimizing, keep the momentum going, maybe we won't have to sit still long enough to face what the silence might reveal. It's an old strategy. It's also exactly what's happening in Daniel 5, on the very night an

There is a big difference between questioning your faith and abandoning your faith. That distinction matters. In some Christian circles, even asking difficult questions can feel dangerous. A person encounters something in Scripture they do not understand, wrestles with an intellectual objection, struggles with doubt, or discovers that something they were taught does not actually seem to fit the Bible, and immediately wonders whether they are drifting away from God. But Script

There's a particular kind of pride that doesn't announce itself as pride. It sounds more like satisfaction. You stand back from something you've spent years building — a career, a home, a reputation, a platform — and something in you quietly says, look what I did. It's not always arrogance. Sometimes it's just tired relief after a long climb. But Scripture has a way of asking an uncomfortable question right at that exact moment: whose kingdom is this, really? That's precisely

For years, one of the familiar stories in American Christianity has been that men are missing from the church. Women have often attended more consistently, participated more visibly, and carried significant responsibility within congregational life. So churches have rightly asked an important question: How do we reach men? But perhaps we have been asking a question that is too small. The deeper question is not simply, “Are men coming to church?” It is, “Are men becoming like

You don't need a ninety-foot gold statue to feel the pressure to conform. Most days it's quieter than that — a notification, a scroll, a comparison you didn't ask for, a rhythm of urgency that never quite lets go of your attention. The modern world doesn't need to build monuments to get you to bow. It just needs your attention on repeat. Little by little, almost without noticing, we start giving our time, our imagination, and our anxiety to whatever plays the loudest music. T

We live in a world competing for our attention. A notification vibrates. A screen lights up. A headline catches our eye. A video ends, and another begins before we have even decided whether we want to watch it. We pick up our phone to check one thing and, fifteen minutes later, wonder where the time went. Most of us recognize the problem. But perhaps we have not considered its spiritual significance. What if our attention span is not merely a matter of productivity? What if i

Check your phone. Go ahead. How many times have you unlocked it in the last hour? Most of us don't reach for our phones because something urgent is waiting. We reach for them because we're afraid of missing something, of losing our grip on a day that already feels like it's slipping away. We call it staying on top of things. It might be something else entirely: a quiet, exhausting attempt to control a life that was never ours to control in the first place. Believe it or not,

There are encouraging signs in the current conversation about men and Christianity. After years of headlines announcing the decline of male participation in church, some researchers are beginning to see indications that men—particularly younger men—are showing renewed interest in Christianity. We should be grateful for every sign of spiritual hunger. But we should also ask a more important question: Are men merely becoming more interested in Christianity, or are they becoming

There is a danger that can exist in the church without looking like sin. You can know the Bible and not obey it. You can explain the gospel and fail to live by faith. You can listen to sermons every week, read Christian books, memorize Scripture, discuss theology, and accumulate years of Christian vocabulary and yet remain remarkably unchanged. It is possible to become spiritually informed without becoming spiritually mature. That is a sobering thought, and it is precisely th

Daniel 1 introduces us to four young men carried into exile and immersed in a culture determined to reshape their identity, convictions, and worship. Yet Daniel and his friends demonstrate that faithfulness to God is possible even when surrounded by pressure to compromise. In the message above, we walk through Daniel 1 and explore what it means to remain faithful when the world around us pulls us in another direction. Daniel’s courage was not rooted in his circumstances, his

Loneliness is one of the strangest experiences of modern Christian life. We can sit in a crowded sanctuary and still feel alone. We can have hundreds of social-media connections and no one we would call when life falls apart. We can attend church every Sunday, participate in a small group, serve on a ministry team, and still quietly wonder, “Does anyone really know me?” For Christians, loneliness can feel especially confusing. We belong to Christ. We have been adopted into th