Grace is Hard Work

I’m constantly amazed at how much we resist grace. Not in receiving grace, though there is some of that. There are some people whose guilt is so great that they just can’t handle grace, seemingly thinking that it would feel much better if they could somehow earn forgiveness. That would make them worthy of...

Forgetting Faith in Formulas

A couple of years ago I was making a guitar with zebrawood for the back and sides. Zebrawood is an African hardwood with bold tan and brown stripes, and it was my first time working with it. The guitar was a cutaway, which is tricky because it requires the wood to be bent into some pretty severe curves. My...

Love, Grace, and Reproof

Whenever I write or speak about grace, forgiveness, and the dangers of judgmentalism I invariably get some pushback from some who think that I’m going easy on sin. Some of this is from people who seem to genuinely feel that grace itself is too easy on sin. I think this reflects a fundamental...

Real (Not Ideal) Church

Thirty-three years ago, Pam and I were newly engaged and getting ready for our June wedding when the warnings started coming in. Warnings about marriage. The warnings were disguised as wisdom from those who had successfully navigated the matrimonial waters for many, many years, but they were warnings...

Let God Be God

In the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve committed the original sin—“original” not in the sense that it was The-First-Sin-Ever but rather that it’s the first sin that any of us take that leads to all the rest—when they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In other words,...

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