While friends do (and should) encourage and uplift us, they should also create edifying wounds. These wounds aren’t meant to break or destroy us but, through their pain, lead us to growth. Like a vinedresser cutting away the dead vines or the sculptor carving away imperfections, our friendships should sharpen us—but such sharpening isn’t always comfortable.

“I have good news and bad news. God has called us to move back home.”
Our friend’s words stunned me. He told us God was leading him and his family, whom we had grown to see as our own family, to move back to his hometown.
My emotions moved like the sea line. One hour I fought sadness, another I struggled with loneliness, another moment fear surged through me, and yet another anger boiled in me. Though I initially directed my feelings at my friends, I later saw they were truly directed at God.
Why did you give us these close friends? I cried out to him. Why did you bring us together in such deep friendships only to tear them away from us two years later?
In the wake of that announcement, I’m not sure I loved my friends as well as I would have said I did.
Love Grows with Knowledge and Discernment
On earth, we will never reach a point of loving one another perfectly (because we are each still in our sinful flesh), yet we can always be growing in our love for one another.
The Thessalonians modelled this. In his first letter to them, Paul exclaimed his gratitude for their labor of love (1 Thess. 1:2–3), and in his second letter he declared that their love had grown ever greater (2 Thess. 1:3). Could someone say the same of your love for others? Has your love grown ever greater?
Perhaps we must first consider: How does our love grow? It grows in knowledge and discernment, which can only be produced from Scripture. As Paul wrote to the Philippians, “And I pray this: that your love will keep on growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment, so that you may approve the things that are superior and may be pure and blameless in the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God” (Phil. 1:9–11).
Our love should be based on knowledge—our knowledge of how we were first loved by the Savior (1 John 4:19). It’s according to this love by which God covered us that we love others—with grace, selflessness, and truth. We love one another with knowledge of the truth, always seeking to encourage them in further holiness.
Is your love founded in this kind of knowledge and discernment? What does it look like to live this way?
Allowing God to Lead Them
A week after my dear friend told me they were moving, God led me to a passage in Acts:

While we were staying [in Caesarea] for many days, a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea. And coming to us, he took Paul’s belt and bound his own feet and hands and said, ‘Thus says the Holy Spirit, “This is how the Jews at Jerusalem will bind the man who owns this belt and deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.” When we heard this, we and the people there urged him not to go up to Jerusalem. Then Paul answered, “What are you doing, weeping and breaking my heart? For I am ready not only to be imprisoned but even to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.” (Acts 21:9–14)

Read More
Related Posts:

When we feel weak and frustrated by how limited we are, we can turn to him and find rest, knowing he has taken care of all we need for salvation in the gospel. We don’t need to work without ceasing to prove our worth to our Father because Christ has already accomplished all we need for salvation. We can now serve God out of a place of rest and gratitude.

I collapsed into the wingback chair. A long walk on the trail pushing the stroller over bumps and ruts in the summer heat and humidity had exhausted my body. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and begged for water. I propped my feet up and gulped down a glass of water and chewed into an energy bar to restore my body.
My eyes flitted over all the unfinished work surrounding me. The laundry still needed to be folded, the office still needed to be organized from cleaning out the desk, the kitchen floor still needed sweeping from supper, and the bathroom still needed renovating.
On days like this, I long for eternal strength. I wish I never became weak or faint. I wish I could stay up into the late hours of the night finishing all these projects without taking a break. Sometimes I even try to push through, knowing I’ll pay for it that night as I try to fall asleep with a racing mind and throbbing feet.
I not only do this in physical exhaustion but mental and emotional exhaustion. When I feel as if my mind is going to break from helping one more person, comforting one more screaming child, or volunteering for one more activity, I put my head down and plow forward anyway, taking on even more tasks.
Yet as humans, we will never know what it’s like to run without tiring, to exercise without sore muscles, to work at a desk all day and not have our minds turn to mush, or to care for every single hurting person we encounter. Though we may resist and pump more caffeine into our veins, eventually our bodies will give out. As mothers, we know how lack of sleep crumples us in every way and what happens when we spend an entire meal running from child to child serving food without ever sitting down to eat ourselves.
Can you relate to this constant drive toward exhaustion? This regular imaginary play that we can be eternal like God? Are you tired of it—but likewise feel as if you can’t stop? We must relinquish such travail and toil and rest in God’s eternality—though first, we should understand where this drive stems from.
The Culture of Efficiency
What leads to this constant striving to be eternal? Perhaps our modern culture plays a part.
Our current North American culture upholds and honors that which is efficient and produces the most content or product. If we have nothing to show for our work at the end of the day, was it truly worth it? If we didn’t maximize production and speed on every task, did we truly do our best? As AI continues to thrive, we may begin to wonder: if I can’t be eternal like God, I might get replaced by a machine.
Meanwhile, much of our meaningful work is anything but efficient. Relationships, parenthood, marriage, art, education, and pastoral care (to name just a few) are utterly inefficient when done well. It’s not productive to spend eighteen years producing a well-equipped, godly human being. Am I truly maximizing my time by spending several hours working on a painting only my husband and children will see? Perhaps you could have written a month’s worth of sermons this week if that family didn’t have an unexpected crisis.
Often we have less to show for ourselves at the end of the day, and to our world that is humiliating. But God calls us to a much humbler way of life: rest and trust in his eternality, accepting the good limits he placed on us.
God Is Eternal and We are Not
God is eternal. Dwell on that for a moment.
Read More
Related Posts:

Friendship isn’t formed only on these surface-level conversations but instead on the weightier ones of life, hardship, anger, battles, confessions, and questions. We’ll never be able to minister to one another in our fights with sin and suffering if we never answer truthfully, “How are you today?” It’s impossible to bear one another’s burdens without first reaching the heart and earning trust.

We all engage in conversations on various levels. We know the light and airy conversations of the weather, the funny antics our children did last week, the novel we just started reading, and brainstorming new meals to feed our families.
In some relationships, we easily sink into deeper conversations. I think of my sister-in-law, my friend Michelle, and a pastor’s wife I know. Within a few visits together, we swim through the surface-level conversations of dirty diapers and streaky floors and, without noticing, we tread into the deeper and sometimes murkier places of life. We move from giggling about the silly things our husbands did on our first dates to the arguments from the previous night. We may start by rolling our eyes at the unreal number of dishes we wash each day to sharing the fearful thoughts for our children that come to mind as we washed those dishes yesterday.
There are some women I sit down with whose kind eyes and gentle questions seem to uncork my heart and lead me to pour out my honest questions, past hardships, and current struggles with sin. Others, though I still enjoy their presence, stay within unspoken boundary lines of wall colors, water bottle choices, and tips on how to hide vegetables in our children’s food.
What makes these conversations so different? How can we dive beyond the surface of our relationships and encourage deeper conversations?
They were willing to initiate.
Few people want to be the first one to share. I like to wait and listen to how others respond and then gauge how I should frame my response. I often do the same in conversations. If they discuss the recent snowfall, I’ll reply with how my son and I share a distaste for the cold weather. But if they share about how postpartum depression nearly debilitates them in the winter months, I may feel the nudge to tell them how my depression is likewise worse when snowstorms and snowbanks keep me trapped inside.
Those who engage us in deeper conversations are willing to go first and share their pain. They don’t over-share for sake of gasps—they want to go beyond the shallow end. They want to know us. They want friendship, a companion to shoulder suffering with. They want to know they aren’t alone. And they in turn are willing to take the risk of vulnerability so we won’t feel alone either.
Being proactive: What are some ways we can steward our stories well? Who is going through a similar experience as you that you could share your story with to encourage them?
Read More
Related Posts:

A gentle spirit isn’t cultivated through gritted teeth, clenched fists, and a strained smile. Gentleness grows in a heart set on this truth: the Lord is near (Phil. 4:5b). A gentle woman holds a deep, residing peace in her heart that comforts her anxieties. She knows her life is in God’s hands, therefore anything that passes by her, it first passed through him. She trusts in the full truth of Romans 8:28–30.

As suffering rattled through our lives, I felt like an acorn clinging to a branch as an axe sliced into the trunk of my tree. We spun in every direction as we tumbled to the ground, until we finally hit the leafy, forest bottom.
We tried to make the best of it, to see the good. Here’s a nice, shady spot to dig our roots deep. Maybe now we’ll begin to grow. Instead, we were further kicked, tossed, and thrown, receiving a few cracks to our shell throughout. When it all finally ended, I didn’t dare believe it.
As we suffer, and our bodies and hearts finally begin to recover from the richeting and shaking we’ve received, bitterness settles in easily as if it had always lived there inside us. Without any effort, our words are slightly sharpened to an edge from the cracks we’ve endured. “Of course, bad things always happen to me.” “I mean, is it any surprise something like this would happen again?” The people we love distort to look like our enemies in our vision—rather than come together to recover and carry one another, we snap and snarl instead. Not a single offense gets covered, and each one endures our full wrath.
What doesn’t come naturally is gentleness. Yet this is the calling of the Christian: to not be formed into a crusted, bitter-hard shell from our suffering, but to gently flourish into a beautiful, strong tree, bearing fruit for others to receive.
The Molding Power of Suffering
When the axe comes for our trunks, when tree-cutting season inevitably comes, people often remind us of Romans 8:28—for God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God.
This is intended to fall on our ears as a comforting promise, but when it stands alone with us in the midst of a trial as we soak our pillow with tears and bark splinters below, we may wonder what that good could possibly be.
If we continue to read past verse 28, God defines the good. “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified” (vv. 29–30 ESV). Sanctification is the goodness beyond our eyesight. God predestined each believer before the foundations of the earth to become Christ-like, and he promises to see each of them to glorification (Eph. 1:4; Phil. 1:6; 1 Thess. 5:23–24).
Read More
Related Posts:

The church is meant to draw in everyone and anyone, because the church is made up of people across all generations, cultures, races, levels of education, careers, and backgrounds. The message of Scripture is for anyone who would trust in Christ for their salvation (Rom. 1:16). If as a church we are striving to only reach a niche, ideal churchgoer (and thus exclude others), we’ve missed the purpose to which God has called us.

Everywhere our eyes rove, we see branding: the spine of the book you’re reading, the ads dispersed in your Facebook feed, the cartoon on the milk in your fridge, the labels on our clothing, and the sticker on your child’s school binders. I can dig through thrift store bins of blue jeans and recognize what brand they are simply by the back pockets.
Branding is what helps us recognize our favorite brands—it helps us buy the smooth and creamy almond milk instead of the stuff that tastes like water and chalk. Branding also helps us recognize our favorite content creators on social media—we immediately discern their fonts, colors, and logos and slow our scroll to read what they’ve posted.
It sounds harmless, right? Perhaps even helpful. As a believer, you may even strive to choose your church based on its branding—or lack of branding for that matter. But what if branding shouldn’t be a part of the church at all?
The purpose of branding is inclusion and exclusion.
In an article on Forbes about the ten golden rules of branding, they explain that branding requires a niche focus:

Keeping your message focused for your target demographic will make it that much easier to both create content around your personal brand and have others define you … The narrower and more focused your brand is, the easier it is for people to remember who you are.[1]

During my freshman year of college, I started my first blog, and I dove into every resource I could find on Google about how to blog successfully. Over and over, this same message repeated itself in nearly every article I read. Branding begins by identifying a specific reader you want to reach—so specific that you should think of one single person and create each piece of content for that particular reader.
Once you’ve created this ideal client/reader, you form your brand to best reach them. In another article in Forbes, they explain that where most brands and businesses fail is by trying to reach everyone, but businesses that begin with a narrowed niche tend to thrive. [2] In other words, the more specific your ideal customer is, the more likely it is for your business to succeed.
By creating a brand like this, you are seeking to draw in people like your ideal client and in turn drive away anyone who isn’t like them. Consider some well-known brands like Hollister: If middle-aged people walked into one of those stores, would they get the sense that they belonged there? Of course not, because the brand is built to draw in teenagers who like beachy styles.
Branding is incompatible with the message and mission of the church.
This model is useful for businesses. If you’re a Christian freelance writer, you don’t want to draw in clients looking for medical writers. My husband runs a business repairing and building guitars, and he doesn’t want to draw in people who want factory-built wind instruments. As a business, you must put your energy into reaching the right people, not all people.
But this business model can’t work for the church.
Read More
Related Posts:

Fathers of the faith came up against the same flavors of heresy that we do today, and to battle against these false doctrines they opened Scripture and wrote creeds to help ordinary believers understand. Thanks be to God, he has preserved these creeds, and confessions in more recent history, for us today. While the creeds don’t carry the authority of Scripture, they communicate and summarize the essential truths of Scripture. I recommend getting to know the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed, which were specifically created to summarize the teaching of Scripture and condemn trinitarian heresies.

Have you ever found yourself trying to explain the Trinity to a child? Or perhaps even a teen or adult who has never heard of the concept? I have three little ones, one of whom is a four-year-old bubbling with questions. Here is an example of a recent bedtime conversation we had:
“Mommy, what is the Trinity?”
“The Trinity is God. Three Persons, one God.”
His face scrunched up. “How can God be three Persons but one God?”
This is where I should be able to tell you I gave the most perfect, theologically sound answer to my child and tell you how you can do the same.
I did no such thing.
“Um… well… he just is.”
“But how did Jesus come to earth and the Father remain in heaven?”
“Well, I… um…”
“How is God a Father and a Son?”
Many Christians struggle with how to give a sound explanation of the Trinity.
As I grappled and hummed, my four-year-old kept listing off question after question—none for which I had an answer. I was tempted to use one of those explanations I had heard in church growing up: God is like an egg, God is like the three forms of water, God is like a flower… but I knew that all those fell flat because, in one way or another, they all promoted a trinitarian heresy.
For years, I’ve prided myself on my passion for theology and biblical literacy, and my shelves sagged with heavy academic books. But as I tucked my child in that night, I was humbled by my lack of a basic understanding of the Trinity.
I have a feeling I’m not alone. You don’t have to be a mother to be faced with the dilemma of explaining the Trinity. You could be a Sunday school teacher (for any age) being asked to further explain, or reclining at a family meal where the conversation of religion comes up. Or maybe you’ve stood in your doorway with someone evangelizing to you about their religion that seems to mirror Christianity but smells of tritheism. Or perhaps you’re alone studying your Bible and wondering how God can possibly be three Persons and one God. Let’s open our Bibles and get to know the Trinity together. But first, in case you’re still not fully convinced you need to know this, let’s dive into why the Trinity matters.
Our theology of the Trinity affects our fundamental understanding of what Christianity means.
Because of how convoluted and confusing this doctrine can appear, we may be tempted to push it to the side. We loop it in with doctrines such as the end times and say, “It’s something we just won’t be able to grasp this side of heaven.” But the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to Christian theology. When we get the Trinity wrong, we get all of Christianity wrong. That’s what makes first-order Christian doctrines so vital to our faith: Everything that we believe is rooted in them, and once you alter those ground-level doctrines it changes how the entire tree grows. The Trinity is no different.
If we don’t emphasize the oneness of the Trinity correctly, we move towards tritheism—the worship of three gods rather than one. This breaks the first commandment (Exod. 20:2–3) and goes against God’s clear revelation of him: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one,” (Deut. 6:4; cf. Mark 12:29; John 17:3; Rom. 3:30). But if we blend them too much together, we get another heresy that goes against the clear revelation of the three distinct Persons (Gen. 1:1–27; Matt. 3:13–17; John 1:1–5).
Getting the Trinity wrong likewise skews the gospel message by which we are saved. Did one of our gods die for our sins after the greater god told him to? Or did the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God, die in our place because of a covenant made in eternity past between the three perfect, eternal Persons of the Godhead? Does a lower, lesser god indwell us, or does God himself indwell us through the Third Person of the Trinity? These questions matter, and they change the whole of our salvation when answered wrongly.
Even if we aren’t the ones falling for these false doctrines, we need to be prepared to give the right answer to those who ask (1 Pet. 3:15). These people might come into your classroom, bump into you at church, sit in your small group, or knock on your front door. Will you give them biblical truth? Will you be able to defend what you believe?
Inconspicuous Trinity “drifts” can still be found around us.
The examples I gave above are a bit on the further end of the spectrum, and likely you won’t encounter them to that extreme in your church, books, podcasts, blogs, or social media feed. But that doesn’t mean the Trinity isn’t still skewed in evangelical theology.
Read More
Related Posts:

Any emotion can lead to sin. Our happiness over a new job could lead to unkind gloating when we’re with our friends. Our passion for theology can lead to pride when studying the Bible with those who don’t understand the long words we use. Anger likewise can become sinful, but it can also be untangled from our sinful nature and become righteous as well.

If you’ve been around kids long enough, you know how short their temper can be.
I sat on the floor with one of my fourteen-month-olds, helping him learn to build a tower with rubber blocks. He had watched his older brother and his twin brother do it, and now he wanted to try himself. I lay down on the mat and gathered eight blocks in front of him. I placed the red one to start and handed him the orange one. He smiled, and his big brown eyes lit up as he took the block in his little, pudgy hand. He delicately placed it on top of the red and grinned at me as he clapped his hands together. I cheered for him and passed him the yellow one. 
He lifted the block above the orange, but not quite high enough. The yellow block in his hand bumped the orange one and knocked it to the floor. As he watched the orange one fall, he quickly tried to put the yellow one on top of the red, but with his haste, it tumbled to the floor as well. He furrowed his dark brows together and grunted, then tossed the red block. 
My first instinct when I see anger in my children (or in myself) is to squash it. No, you’re not allowed to be angry; anger is a bad emotion. Stop being angry and start being happy, grateful, or some kind of positive emotion. Anger is sin. 
When I started therapy, however, I was taught that anger isn’t an enemy to squash. As I, in turn, searched Scripture, the Holy Spirit guided me to see that he’s not anti-anger either. All anger isn’t sin. Rather, anger is a good emotion when rightly used. As a professional emotion-stuffer, this has been a hard lesson to learn and one that God, in his good patience, is teaching me over and over again as I parent my children and re-teach myself. 
Is Anger Always A Sin?
I saw a pastor post online, “Only one person [Jesus] can have a ‘righteous frustration’ just as there is one who can have a ‘righteous anger.’” When someone challenged this comment by reminding the pastor that the Bible instructs us to be like Christ, he said this was a divine attribute we are unable to foster. I know this pastor’s beliefs are not alone; I remember hearing a similar sentiment from a professor lecturing at a Christian university a few years prior.
Many Christians are taught that anger is sinful and—like me—stuff their anger and shame themselves for having such an emotion. Yet is this true? Can only the holy Godhead have righteous anger?
In Psalm 4:4, David instructs Israel by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, “Be angry, and do not sin.” Paul, quoting this Psalm, tells the church in Ephesus, “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph. 4:26). Both passages instruct believers to be angry, and their only qualification is to avoid sin. If righteous anger is impossible, why would the Bible call us to it?
We like to set boundaries for ourselves as believers to avoid sin, but often we go beyond Scripture to the point of declaring what God calls good evil. Yet just because an act or emotion raises the possibility of being abused by our sinful hearts doesn’t make it evil. 
The Pharisees did this during Jesus’s day. In efforts to protect Israel from breaking God’s law again, they created man-made laws that stretched beyond God’s perfect law, to the point that they followed their man-made laws to the neglect of God’s law. They wouldn’t help the poor on the Sabbath because it was classified as work by their man-made laws. 
Read More
Related Posts:

The Bible is not a handbook for life or an encyclopedia to which we turn when we don’t know what to do. The Bible is not a love letter from God. The Bible is one continuous story of God bringing about the gospel. As Jen Wilkin puts it in her book Women of the Word, “The Bible purposes to tell us this Big Story in a thousand smaller stories, from its first page to its last.”[3]

Do you struggle to connect the dots in your Bible reading? As you work through the Old Testament into the New Testament, does it feel like there’s a gaping hole between them of stories, events, and laws that don’t seem to fit together?
Maybe you read the Bible like this: The Old Testament is law and wrath, but when Jesus finally appeared in the New Testament, everything became about grace and good news. Then the Bible ends with some rules and promises and a terrifying and cryptic picture of the end times and eternity.
The best we can do is say that we’re not really sure what this means. Perhaps God was angrier back then; Israel is special; you’re David and your problem is Goliath; Jesus saves; follow these rules; and you’re unsure how it will all go down, but you’ll be walking on gold pavement. Sound accurate? Can you relate?
That’s how I understood the Bible. I avoided the Old Testament because I couldn’t make sense of it, and I really didn’t like how angry God seemed. There were times when the New Testament left me baffled and with more questions than answers (for example, the entire book of Hebrews). This disconnect begins when we forget the narrative arch of Scripture: the gospel. We need to read our Bibles with a bird’s eye view that sees how the gospel stretches over the pages of Scripture from beginning to end.
Jesus is revealed from Genesis to Revelation.
After Jesus’ crucifixion, the disciples were downtrodden. They thought the Messiah had finally come—they were so certain that they had left everything behind to follow him. Yet, three days prior he was crucified and placed in a tomb. Then something strange happened. The women went to the tomb and found it empty, and an angel announced that Jesus was alive. Peter and John checked the tomb themselves and found only the grave clothes.
Two of these downtrodden and perplexed disciples were walking on the road to Emmaus when their Savior (though with his identity veiled from them) approached them. When they explained their sadness over the events that had taken place, he rebuked them.

“O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. (Luke 24:25-27).

The thick thread that binds the entire Bible together is Jesus himself.
“Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” What does this tell us about the Bible? Jesus doesn’t enter at the New Testament—Jesus is present throughout the entire Bible. Jesus isn’t the climax or falling action of the story—he is the entire story.[1] That thick thread that binds the entire Bible together is Jesus himself.
Eden wasn’t simply a foiled plan A and the gospel plan B. Before the foundations of the earth, the gospel was already in place. As Michael Brown and Zach Keele write in Sacred Bond: Covenant Theology Explored,

Before the creation of the world, a plan was already in place to send the Son as the second Adam to remedy the disastrous results of the first Adam’s failure to fulfill the covenant of works in the garden of Eden and bring humankind to glory.

Read More
Related Posts: