On the surface, one of the most unattractive things about Christianity to our culture today is its view of sex; but if you look underneath the surface and get a better grasp on what is really taught, the Christian view of sex is one of the most attra...
Do you understand what your heart is really like? In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is saying that the reason we’re inauthentic or hiding from other people is because we’re actually being inauthentic with ourselves, hiding from ourselves. We’re deepl...
As soon as you hear the word relationships, right away you say, “Ah, relationships,” and you think of friendship or romance. But the main purpose of the Sermon on the Mount is to talk about our relationships to other people, to those outside of our c...
What is the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus? In 1 Corinthians 15, there are three basic things Paul says about the resurrection as he answers three questions. We must confront these three questions about Jesus’ resurrection: 1) did it happen? 2)...
Christianity is utterly different from religion. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says there are two paths—one that leads to life and one that leads to destruction. And here’s what the scary thing is: both ways have people praying, giving...
Every other revolutionary who ever lived was really only trying to rework or reshuffle the same old kingdom. Except Jesus. A kingdom always has three things. It has a pattern of values, a power to implement those values, and a product or impact. In t...
What can the music of John Coltrane tell us about the relationship of art to God, and of our own work in general to God? We can all learn quite a lot from Coltrane, actually. And what we can see in his approach to his music applies not just to music...
In Ecclesiastes, the author takes the position of a practical secularist. And he asks, “If this life is all there is, then is life meaningless?” The writer says if this life is all there is, if there’s no God and no meaning that you have to submit to...
Today’s sermon comes from a series on the life of Jesus described in the gospel of Luke. Luke gives us many of Jesus’ teachings on what it means to be a disciple. In short, a disciple is one who applies the gospel to absolutely every single area of l...
Consider how much of your time, how much of your life, is built around your work. Yet, so many of the books and materials that look at what it means to live as Christians only focus on our evenings and our weekends. How are we to be a Christian on th...
Some of you may know I was actually a teacher at graduate school seminary for five years. Then I said, “Get me back in the ministry,” where there is no grading papers and no one knows whether people are learning or not. But the gospel changes everyth...
If you’re Christian, what is the rationale for being an actor? Why should Christians be actors? How should Christians who are actors or writers or choreographers or directors think about their faith and their work? To answer that, we need to look at...
The gospel affects how you do your work, how you do your job, and how you pursue your vocation. But how? If we’re going to understand what Paul says in this passage, we need to look at 1) some background work and historical context, 2) practical pri...
How does the gospel affect your work? We’re in a series where we’re asking, “What happens when you take the gospel, the basic message of Jesus Christ, out of the church and into the world?” One of the things that happens is it affects the way in whi...
When we talk about creativity, we mean artists of course. But we also actually mean entrepreneurs—whose creativity is as important to what they do as anything else. So thinking about creativity, what does Christianity have to say to it? The answer is...
