Mark was a quitter. He committed to a mission trip with Paul and Barnabas, but he bailed when the going got tough. "Now Paul and his companions set sail from Paphos and came to Perga in Pamphylia. And John (Mark) left them and returned to Jerusalem, but they went on from Perga and came to Antioch in Pisidia” (Acts 13:13-14a). While the mission went forward, Mark pulled a Jonah and sailed in the opposite direction. Mark’s abandonment was a big deal to Paul. Later on, another opportunity arose for a second mission trip, “Barnabas wanted to take with them John [...]

Being a Christian is a lot like being an athlete. Paul loves to make the comparison (2 Timothy 2:5, Philippians 3:14). “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it” (1 Corinthians 9:24). Paul understood that Christians need to think like athletes. There is a prize for all the hard work we need to do. The better the performance, the bigger the rewards. Like athletes, we need motivation. When NFL teams clash on a Sunday afternoon, they are highly motivated. Each team is striving [...]

Prophets are known to use sarcasm at times. Elijah famously told some Baal worshippers that their “god” was silent because perhaps “he is relieving himself” (1 Kings 18:27); he encouraged them to “cry aloud, for he is a god.” Isaiah used sarcastic irony to convey contempt for those who cut down a cedar tree to make an idol, who then pray to it, saying “Deliver me, for you are my God!” while they burn the rest of the cedar wood and say, “Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire!” (Isaiah 44:16). These are famous examples. But have you [...]

There are two ways to describe what happened to the shattered plate lying on the floor. One is in the passive voice; the other is in the active voice. One would be an irresponsible answer to the owner of the plate who discovers it lying on the floor; the other would be to take responsibility. The guy who dropped the plate could say, “It fell from my hand,” or he could say, “I dropped it.” Both constructions form true statements, but one sentence is better than the other. To say “It fell from my hand” might seem like the better [...]

There were no migraine headaches in the Garden of Eden. No back or hip pain. No cancer. Adam and Eve wouldn’t even have been sore in the morning after going for an especially long walk the day before. The pains of this life came into existence through the fall of man into sin. Genesis 3:17-19 records the curse: “And to Adam he said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, “You shall not eat of it,” cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you [...]

Hudson Taylor called it “the exchanged life.” It was his spiritual secret, his superpower. “If I had a thousand pounds, China could have them all. If I had a thousand lives, I’d give them all to China. No, not to China, but to Christ. Can we do too much for such a Savior?” The exchanged life is letting this life go for God’s eternal reward. The exchanged life is the paradox that “whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). Jesus offers abundant life to anyone who lays [...]

Years of blood, sweat, and tears blasted off into the sky as SpaceX attempted to be the first private company to put a rocket into orbit. The first attempt had failed due to a fuel-line leak that ignited a fire. Here then was the company’s attempt to redeem itself. But as the starship moved into the second stage of its flight, the fuel in the tank began to slosh…the dreaded slosh. The SpaceX team had “slosh” ranked eleventh on the list of things that could scuttle the shuttle. But every risk they addressed would come with a tradeoff. In this [...]

If every Sunday morning service is an evangelistic crusade, then the congregation will be a mile wide and an inch deep. Conversely, if no Sunday morning services offer explicit presentations of the gospel, then the congregation will be an inch wide and an inch deep. Paul teaches a better way: “And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much [...]

“Godliness with contentment is great gain” (1 Timothy 6:6). This is perhaps the greatest of all the lessons that Paul has been teaching us about joy. He has saved it for last. It is assumed here that to be godly, one must be born of God. Godliness is therefore the precondition for being a happy Christian. But it is an obvious fact of life that not all Christians are happy. The missing element that, if found, would allow any Christian to be truly happy, is contentment. Contentment is the state of a Christian’s heart when gratitude has become greater than [...]

The church at Philippi was troubled by some contentious women—Euodia and Syntyche.  The temptation to contentiousness, which finds its expression in nagging, fault-finding, chastising, complaining, emoting and the like, is a particularly strong temptation for women. The Bible does not contain a counterpart referring to men when it comes to the book of Proverbs, where, in verses 21:19, 25:24, and 27:15, those addressed repeatedly are contentious women. Now, men are specifically singled out in the Bible in a warning about “anger and quarreling” (1 Timothy 2:8), the masculine temptation here to be avoided being the desire to punch one another, [...]