A friend of mine went to a local men’s store to buy some dress shirts. And the salesperson came up to him. Now, you need to know this about my friend. If there’s anybody who would embody the fizz of a champagne glass, he’s it. He is effervescent, he is bubbly, he is fun to…

How can we be in the season of Advent already? I imagine this thought has crossed your mind, just as it has mine. In this season, people love to talk about how busy they are. Our schedules overflow with shopping, decorating and baking along with all the traditional church activities. As believers, we have the…

Last week, we learned that Advent is about celebrating the difference that Christ makes in our lives. We have a natural tendency to want to fit in. But once we make a commitment to follow Jesus Christ, we don’t fit in anymore. Following Jesus goes against so much of what our culture says.   That’s why,…

Probably one of the most painful things that can happen to almost anybody, particularly on our present culture, is to be different. To not look like everybody else. To not fit in. To know that somehow the crowd is there, and I’m here, and I don’t know that I belong in that crowd at all.…

There’s an organization I like quite a lot called Youth With A Mission, or YWAM. They have a special phrase: “coming in the opposite spirit.” Here’s what they mean by that: In the face of a culture that, now more than ever, is absolutely fascinated with material accumulation, the exaltation of personal power, and the…

Think bigger. Those are the words that surprised me when I spoke them to a group of youth. I was talking about how God can actually change our lives through prayer and use us to have an impact on other people. I meant for them to think bigger about themselves as well as the way…

“Religion dry as dust will never do.” Dry as Dust That’s the opening line of a sermon from a famous preacher of the mid-twentieth century by the name of Harry Emerson Fosdick. Fosdick was, during World War II, the pastor of what we would now call a mega-church, a Protestant, non-denominational congregation known as Riverside…

You may or may not be familiar with the old hymn, “Beneath the Cross of Jesus” (you can listen to it here). As Christians, we all live beneath the cross of Christ. But what does that mean? I believe it means that the cross influences our lives in profound ways, ways that distinguish us from…

One of the things we consistently hear from Olympic athletes, no matter what the sport, is that there’s nothing like the roar of the crowd. The terrifying, pressure-filled experience of being in the center of the stadium is instead encouraging as teammates and others cheer them on. And that’s a part of what the writer…

Three men essentially created the foundation for what we know as English church music: two Germans, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederic Handel; and one Englishman, Henry Purcell. George Frederic Handel became a British citizen in the mid-1600’s, in essence adopting England as his adult country and from there writing the Messiah. We thank God…