“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11, NIV). We were made for eternity.  We always have been.  Our spiritual great-grandparents, Adam and Eve, were never…

In my teenage years, I became a Pharisee (before I even knew what a Pharisee was) in my ritualistic and overzealous compliance to the laws of God as I understood them.  I was a dotter of i’s and a crosser of t’s when it came to God’s rules for right…

I know now that I hated God.  It’s not that I wanted to hate him or would have ever let it show.  Perhaps, hate is too strong of a word.  Still, I was certainly frustrated in my relationship with God.  I found myself in a spiritual conundrum.  I had to…

My earliest thoughts around the idea of eternity occurred to me as a child.  Sitting on one of the hard, wooden pews in the small country church I attended, I found myself wrestling with this most challenging of concepts.  I was a religious kid, at least on Sunday mornings, when…

“And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6-7, NIV). Recently, I attended…

Holy Communion is one of the sacraments, or “sacred acts” of the Christian Church.  For those who aren’t familiar with this practice, it is a time set aside to remember the final meal Jesus shared with his disciples just hours before he would die on a cross.  The Lord’s Supper,…

“(Jesus) went in and said to them, ‘Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep.’ But they laughed at him. After he put them all out, he took the child’s father and mother and the disciples who were with him, and went in where the…

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin” (Hebrews 4:15, NIV).  This past weekend I returned to my hometown of Ellsworth, Kansas for…

“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20, NIV).  One of my favorite shows as…

Today is the final post in my “King of the Mountain” series.  Over the past several days, we’ve been looking at man’s hunger for power and position, often attained at the expense of others, and how Jesus’ teachings run contrary to such attitudes. Jesus taught that “‘Anyone who wants to…