Written by Justin N. Poythress |
Sunday, October 6, 2024
This is more than the power of positivity or a gratitude journal. The goodness of God alleviates more anxiety than a swaggering self-confidence because it frees you from that dreadful cell of…you. The antidote to anxiety is basking in the truth—God’s got this.

Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down, but a good word makes him glad. – Proverbs 12:25
One of my biggest beefs with sociology is that it tends to be heavy on problems, light on solutions. In its zeal to be labeled as science, it strives to appear objective. Sociology collects heaps of data in order to draw correlations or visualize cultural trajectories. But then, by its own constraints, it has nothing more to say. The problems pop off the page while the solutions are left up to…well, someone! The government, maybe?
Contemporary Christian writing has largely taken the same course. Fortunately, the Bible has a different approach. Take anxiety for example. This proverb doesn’t spend any time analyzing why your parents, career, the economy, or climate change have made you anxious. Social media is an environment that incubates anxiety, but it didn’t create it, otherwise Jesus wouldn’t have had to preach about it.
The Bible assumes anxiety is just there, in the air we breathe.
Therefore, in fighting anxiety, let’s go beyond one more prohibition (less screens), and look at how God pushes from the opposite direction. He tells us to bring a good word.
How to bring a good word.
1. Talk about positives
What unexpected blessings did you receive?
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Written by Justin N. Poythress |
Friday, August 23, 2024
The problem isn’t ordinary life. Jesus slept, ate, joked, and paid taxes. The problem is that we’re content with the ordinary. We need to widen our hearts. We need to learn how the ordinary are sign posts to the greater joys, the greater relationships God has made us for. We need to be planning for growth.

A civil engineer here in Boise shared a consultant’s advice on how the city should plan for growth. The consultant listed three factors a city needs in order to create and sustain a thriving urban culture. 1) A cool downtown scene. 2) A reputable four-year college. 3) Adequate infrastructure. That last one is the peskiest.
As cities grow, roads and traffic create a bolttleneck. It’s like when your arteries near your heart or brain get constricted. Everything else starts to suffer. City planners respond mainly by widening roads. What are you doing when you widen a road and build better infrastructure? You’re making things more accessible. You’re allowing more people to pass through, which means more places can be built, more needs can be met, and better attractions become available. We would do well to apply that lesson to ourselves.
One of my favorite lines in the Bible is from the Apostle Paul talking to the Corinthians, who were citizens of an affluent, happening metropolis. He pleads with them to “widen their hearts” (2 Cor 6:13). Nobody else is holding them back.
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Written by Justin N. Poythress |
Friday, July 7, 2023
Take time to explain unfamiliar movements of Christian worship. Explaining and teaching confession and forgiveness as part of our regular worship will make a striking difference in our churches and in society. When we explain the flow of worship, we also explain patterns that should be part of the rhythm and flow of a Christian’s life.

Reformed pastors love the Reformation—the nailing of 95 theses to the door, the “Here I stand” moment, the wonder of one man facing down the corrupt power of a Pharisaical empire. We love the battle cry of semper reformanda (“always reforming”) and our accompanying daydreams of reenacting Luther’s stand in our day. Yet too often we’re oblivious to lurking dangers that make our churches more like 16-century Rome than the reformers.
Translation was a cardinal virtue of the Reformation before it began. Since the time of Wycliffe and Tyndale, faithful saints have worked to put the Bible into the common language, into the vernacular. The goal of these efforts was to get God’s Word out in such accessible terms that, as Tyndale dreamed, the boy who drives the plow would know the Scriptures better than the scholar.
Does a vision of contextual translation fuel our churches today? Do our sermons and worship services translate in such a way that 20-something Starbucks workers feel as at home in our churches as the university professors? Let’s explore why we still need contextualization and some ways we should embrace it in today’s church.
Need for Translation
Reformed worship is Word-filled and Scripture-directed. We worship God as he commands and not according to our own whims. When we come to worship, we don’t ask “How inventive can we be?” but “What is most consistent with God’s Word?” Having set God’s glory and God’s Word as our aim, we then seek to educate and welcome people in ways that will clearly communicate the historic and biblical truths we profess.
But when Reformed churches, who rightly love history and the Word, refuse to do any contextualizing work, they can develop a class problem. Look around your church community. If you see predominantly educated, well-to-do, white-collar professionals, it may be that your church has failed to translate its Reformed heritage into the common tongue. Educated professionals more easily develop a palate for the beauty of antiquity, but most people today find ancient verbiage to be clunky, awkward, foreign, and cumbersome. In a word, it’s a distraction. 
What’s our objective as church leaders? It’s not to elevate people’s tastes but to elevate Jesus Christ. That doesn’t mean discarding excellence. It means knowing your context. The church in Yale’s backyard should look and sound different from the one off Road 22 in the Kansas wheat fields.
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