Healing is hard because it is a constant battle between your inner child, who is scared and just wants safety; your inner teenager, who is angry and just wants justice; and your current self, who is tired and just wants peace. In my experience, the only true solution to that battle is to surrender it to God and allow Him to work in your life, on His terms and in His time.
Tag Archives: spiritual formation
The Image of the Cross: Curse or Blessing, and What Are You Living? | Daily Bread
Someone told me recently that wearing a cross is a sin. “It’s a graven image, a violation of God’s law.” But a careful study of Scripture tells a very different story.
The second commandment was never a prohibition against every image or symbol. It was a command against worshiping created things as gods. God himself commanded images to be made, each one pointing toward His glory, His presence, and His provision… and ultimately toward the cross.
Christ broke every curse the law carried through His sacrifice, fulfilling what none of us ever could. The cross around the neck of a humble, spirit-filled believer is not an idol. It is a symbol of redemption, freedom, and the good news of salvation. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and we are commanded to carry that truth into the world.
Speaking Truth Is Not the Same as Judging | Daily Bread
To say “don’t judge” sounds humble. It sounds gracious. But underneath it is a confusion that quietly does harm to the very people it wants to protect. Speaking truth is not, in and of itself, judgment. And the kindest thing anyone can do for someone caught in sin is not to make them comfortable in it — it is to point them toward the One who can wash it clean.
When Your Faith Shakes | Daily Bread
This is not a polished testimony with a tidy ending. This is what it actually looks like when the shaking is happening — in real time, in a real life, with a real God who is not confused even when I am. I had thought my faith was at the strongest it had ever been. And then the month I’m about to describe happened. This is what I found when I got quiet enough.
Surrender Is Not Powerlessness: What Your Brain and Your Bible Both Know About Anger
Being pissed off feels powerful. But psychologically and spiritually, it’s a trap. Here’s what your brain and your Bible both know about anger, resentment, and why surrender is the most powerful thing you can do.
Sunday Sessions | Palm Sunday: They Were Waving the Right Branches
They were right that a conqueror was coming. They were right that salvation was riding toward them. They just had no idea the enemy wasn’t Rome, and the victory was six days away.
What the Desert Kept: The Unbound Word | Passing the Scroll
These aren’t questions that destabilize Scripture. What they destabilize is a shallow relationship with Scripture. A faith that can’t survive honest examination probably needed, and still needs, to be examined.
What the Desert Kept: The Unbound Word | Where I Stand
This is the part of this series where I stop circling the evidence and tell you plainly where all of this has landed for me. Not a conclusion to the questions, per se, but the position I’ve taken inside of them.
What the Desert Kept: The Unbound Word | Where the Thread Held
The Dead Sea Scrolls put real pressure on things I thought I understood — canon, transmission, messianic expectation. But pressure is not the same as rupture. A thread under tension is still a thread. This is where it held.
What the Desert Kept: The Unbound Word | What the Scrolls Complicate
The Dead Sea Scrolls don’t undermine the faith. They complicate the comfortable version of it — and that’s not the same thing. Canon fluidity, textual variants, messianic plurality: none of these are hidden, none are invented, and none of them get to stay safely unexamined. Part 3 of What the Desert Kept: The Unbound Word.
Twin Tree Project 