Blog
The challenges we may soon face will require a tough faith. The terrain of what is before us will not be navigated by a weak and untested faith. A tough faith is a reliable faith able to ascend and descend unfamiliar and uneven spiritual terrain. Twenty years ago, a...
Not all who have been called to engage in spiritual warfare will assume their position in the battle. Some no longer believe such battles exist. They have stepped away from the conflict abdicating their role in defending truth. God is calling those with a willing...
The enemy of our soul has laid before us booby traps of deception. These spiritual booby traps appeal to our pride and naivety. Pride leads us into a place of vulnerability and then our naivety has us open the door to a well-planned attack that can take us out because...
A couple of years ago, Jerry Cook came and spoke at our church. Jerry is one of my ministry heroes. For the last 30-plus years he has been a mentoring presence in my life through his writing and teaching. He has also functioned in this mentoring role to...
Each family will go through seasons of challenge and suffering in the course of a lifetime. As a family, we recently experienced one of those times. In the end, God showed up and pointed the situation in a new direction, but at the start we felt...
I will never forget the impact our eighth grade graduation speaker had on my young and developing life. The impact was not positive. I only remember the beginning words of his opening sentence. To his credit, he may have said more, but I shut down...
Twenty years ago, I sat in a large convention center with several thousand pastors. We were attending a denominational conference. One of the scheduled speakers had to cancel at the last moment and Roger Whitlow, a pastor of a large and impacting church in...
A television interview yesterday on The Dove TV about prayer, revival, leadership and God-Whispers.http://var/web/site/public_html.youtube.com/watch?v=GjFFt0tWdXI
I was afraid to go into Junior High School. Horror stories filled my young head about the “big kids” who really didn’t like little guys like me. We heard stories about getting our pants pulled down in front of girls. Much of what I lived in fear of never took place. ...
As a kid growing up we had one of those large, rubber-walled above ground swimming pools in our back yard. The pool stood three feet tall and was about twenty feet across. My brother and I would spend hours each summer swimming and playing in the water under the...
Some of us wait for the miracles to fall before we think a revival can begin. Others are waiting for a cultural icon to come to Christ to set off a line of spiritual dominos falling towards a massive move of God’s Spirit. Jesus had another plan – he said the...
My book, God-Whispers, was just released. It is a small book about a big God. The book is a collection of personal proverbs about life, ministry and the pursuit of God. God-Whispers contains proverbial reflections of one man’s journey of faith. Over the years, I...
As a young pastor I listened a lot. I listened to the many voices of leaders who went before me. There were times in those early years when I would ask a simple question and receive a profound answer. In my first year of pastoring I asked Jerry Cook...
A forthright friend recently commented, “How strange that you are an artist, and yet you are so rigid with your time. So structured. Where’s the passion?” To which I wish I had replied: “Talent and passion don’t just transform themselves into books and paintings. That...
When Jan and I lived in Berlin, Germany we loved walking in the city parks. The park system in Berlin was unlike any I had ever seen. These parks were not the traditional square piece of land with grass and a few trees – the parks in Berlin ran through...