If you want the flourishing, thriving life depicted in Psalm 112, you need to know the God of Psalm 111. They can’t be separated. They are linked. These two psalms are each 10 verses. Psalm 111 describes the great God, and Psalm 112 describes a great, happy human life. If you know the unshakeable God of Psalm 111, you become unshakeable yourself. T…

Psalm 96 is an astonishingly happy psalm. It depicts the whole human race and even the trees, the earth, and the sea just filled with joy and rejoicing. That actually raises a question. This isn’t the world the way we know it. Not everybody is filled with joy, and the world itself is a broken place with natural disasters, disease, and death. How co…

On the weekend before I had surgery for thyroid cancer, I wrestled with this question: “How do you face troubles with peace?” I came to realize it’s not petitionary prayer that helps you face troubles. Of course the Bible is filled with petition, where you go to God and make your needs known. And you should do that. But the ultimate and main way to…

Adoration is a practical skill, one we need to engage in if we’re going to grow into the people God designed us to be. Psalm 27 teaches us about individual, personal, contemplative adoration. And in the center of Psalm 27, it says, “one thing I ask, one thing I seek.” What is that one thing? We learn three things from this psalm about this one thin…

Psalm 81 tells us how to handle the wilderness times of life. It tells us how to use various spiritual disciplines as practical skills in order to handle our times of suffering, our times of pain, our times of difficulty. There are four things we learn here: 1) life is a wilderness, 2) there’s a rock in the wilderness, 3) there’s honey in the rock,…

When you know you’ve screwed up, when you know you’ve failed, how do you get up again in such a way that you have more joy and power than before? There’s a secret basis of confession: it’s a secret only because most of us don’t know about it. And it’s a crucial missing piece in most people’s thinking. Let’s look at what Psalm 32 says about 1) the n…

What are you going to do with the anger that comes when you face serious mistreatment, serious injustice? Modern readers expect the Psalms to give inspiration, so when they read the searing pain and anger in Psalm 137, they say, “What’s this doing in the Bible?” But this passage, in spite of how disturbing it is, tells us some important things abou…

For physical health, we have trainers and doctors. Through nutrition and exercise, trainers help you get further than you were. And when you get sick or injured, doctors help get you back on track. It’s the same thing spiritually. There are spiritual disciplines that are like training and spiritual disciplines that treat problems. We look now at a …

Paul says you have to work the gift of salvation into every nook and cranny of your life, and that you do that through spiritual disciplines. That’s how you change. But the modern mind finds some of these disciplines more appetizing than others. The idea of meditation is sort of cool. But obedience? That’s not very appetizing. And yet, this discipl…

For the first time, in Mark 15, we have Jesus in front of the political establishment, the Roman state. So we have to ask the question, “What is the relationship of Jesus to politics, of Christianity to the government?” Pilate asks three questions. He asks Jesus, “Are you king of the Jews?” and, “Why aren’t you fighting back?” Then he asks the crow…

The word “blessed” in Hebrew is much richer than it is English. It means total fulfillment and well-being. How do we get that? The answer in Psalm 1 is that blessedness comes to a person who has learned to meditate on the law of the Lord. That’s an enormous promise. So let’s ask ourselves what we can learn about meditation, which is one of the disc…

You can’t escape the city anymore. Technology means the kids in the farmlands of Iowa are getting immersed in the culture that’s formed in the cities. The problems of cities dominate the regions and societies in which those cities exist. But as we see in Genesis, the city is a fundamental part of the human condition. And the Bible has some profound…

The story of Noah and the flood is about the fact that God is committed to creation, and he’s ready to give new beginnings. He’s ready to give a second chance. In Genesis 9, God says to Noah and his family the same thing he said to Adam and Eve. In some ways, it gives more detail into what kind of life we’re called into. In a sense, he’s saying, “Y…

Some of you are thinking, “The idea of divine judgment is upsetting, outdated, and irrelevant.” My goal is to respectfully show you that you’re absolutely wrong on all three counts. The story of Noah and the flood is about divine judgment. And if we look at three things being taught in it, we’ll understand the meaning of judgment. And we’ll see wha…

It’s fratricide, it’s brother killing brother, it’s a sensational story—the story of Cain and Abel. People call this the first case study of murder, but I think that’s missing the point. It’s actually the first case study of life east of Eden. In Genesis 4, we see three realities are always present in every day, every part of life east of Eden. It …

The Western romantic idea of human nature was that we’re inherently good. But the problem is over the last century, we’ve discovered that oppression and evil have not gone away but rather have erupted with ferocity over and over again regardless of social and political arrangements. This has created a crisis for the modern secular person. But the b…

Earlier in the twentieth century, the intellectuals of the Western world said it was our society and our institutions that were making us bad. If we changed them, then we’d get rid of atrocities, evil, war, racism, and poverty. But it hasn’t worked. More and more, the Western world is looking back at Genesis, and I believe if you’re smart, you will…

At street level there’s still this saccharine view that human beings are basically good and our problems come from our environment. But the Western intellectual world is beginning to see evidence that there’s something inherently evil and violent in us. And if that’s true, there’s almost no hope. But if you look at Genesis, you have the only hopefu…

We are created for relationship. One of the key differences I hope to show you between the biblical idea of God and other alternative views of God is in this whole idea of relationship. Genesis 1 shows us three things: 1) why we need relationships, 2) what kind of relationships we need, and 3) the key to getting relationships. This sermon was preac…

The book of Acts is all about the earliest Christianity. It shows us something about the character of the earliest Christianity, especially about where the church got its power. The book of Acts, but also the Bible in general, is bound to surprise you. No matter what your culture or what your class, no matter what conceptions and categories you com…

Something is going on with work in our culture. We’ve lost our rhythms of work and rest. And work is becoming a crisis issue. In Genesis 1 and 2, work and rest come up in the very beginning of creation. This tells us that understanding work and rest is at the very essence of living a human life. Let’s look at what this says about 1) what we’re call…

If you live in North America or Europe, the question almost everyone has in mind when they read Genesis 1 is “How?” They ask, “How did it happen? How long did it take?” But how questions aren’t as important as why questions. What you really need to know about this world is why did God make it? What is it for? Why do we feel the way we feel about it…

We’re in the second of a two-part series on the devil and the conflict between supernatural forces of good and supernatural forces of evil. In Part 1, I made my case for why I think it’s immanently sensible to say there really is a devil. And we talked about Satan’s weapons and strategies. If you go through the Bible all the way back to Adam and Ev…

The devil. Spiritual warfare. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, most places in the world, the idea of spiritual warfare—of a conflict between spiritual good and spiritual evil—is not an unusual concept. Many people in many parts of the world think this helps make sense of reality. But here in the Western world, we find it a foreign concept. Let’s loo…

What it means to be a Christian is to be theologically driven—it means stuff about the cross, and grace, and redemption. And all those things have an effect on how we live in every area of our practical lives. It’s helpful to look at the big picture and to see how Christ really is Lord of every area of life. In Ephesians 6, two of those areas are l…