Theology for Everyone

Lately, I’ve been swamped with temporary though important projects consuming my time and attention. Feeling guilty about delaying or limiting focus on more regular needs, I recalled a booklet in a seminary class: Tyranny of the Urgent, by Charles E. Hummel. The primary lesson from this brief...

It’s doubtfully a surprise to anyone to say that we live in an age of increasing division and polarization. This fact seems to accentuate the need for each of us to use wisdom in how we speak and engage with one another. It’s likely that each of us can look back at times in our lives when, in...

Solomon, in wanting his son to pursue and know wisdom, instructs him to “consider the ant” (Proverbs 6:6). The command is to observe and learn the ways of this small but impressive creature. What impressive wisdom does the ant teach us? Diligent. Hard. work. In short, the ant is productive. And...

Your teen-age daughter wants to start dating a young man who is quite nice, very likeable, professes faith in Jesus for salvation, but his dad is an adulterer, even while remaining married, and is verbally abusive toward women. What do you say to her, and why? Someone on pastoral staff at your...

Introduction Reading through the bible seems to be on just about everyone’s list of “to do’s” at the beginning of every year. But that resolution usually ends in failure for most. Some hold on a few months, and some sink within days, but I think if we had solid reasons for reading through the...

I know what it’s like to suffer at the hands of anxiety and I also know the debilitating effects of what has been called OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). The two are often partners in crime. If one is near the other is not far off. For me, anxiety and OCD settled in just before my senior year...

In her rich fantasy novel, Piranesi , author Susanna Clarke has the main character, whose name is also the book’s title, keep a journal for each year he has been living in the Beautiful and Kind House. As described on the back cover, the rooms of the House “are infinite, its corridors endless, its...

There I was: Already running late for an appointment and stuck in traffic behind a line of cars behind a horse and buggy. In my frustration, I thought to honk my horn at the primitive horse-drawn carriage but was stopped when I remembered the all-important truth: God is sovereign. What I perceived...

I have fond memories of growing up in my neighborhood. I was raised in a little country town with one stop light. My friends and I played cops and robbers and the only girl in the neighborhood was as tough as any of us! We would run through the woods with our toy guns yelling, “Bang, bang!” and the...

From the very opening pages of Scripture we see God’s sovereign rule over mankind in an authoritative and governmental way. He gives his law to Adam that he is not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And when Adam and Eve do eat of that tree they are depicted as being in...