This past Sunday, I finished up the sermon series on Biblical communication and conflict resolution.  One of the foundational verses on conflict is James 4:1-2: “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?  You want something but don’t get it.”  That passage reveals a simple yet profound truth – conflict usually happens when we do not get what we want.  And more than that, conflict gets worse when our desires turn into demands. 

Something that I found helpful in understanding how our desires can lead to conflict and what a more Biblical way to handle our frustrated desires might be comes from Dr. Paul David Tripp.  Dr. Tripp contrasts what he calls the “Slippery Slope of Idolatry” with the “Cycle of Faith.” Putting this sort of thing in diagram form can seem slightly mechanical, but can help to put into words what goes on naturally inside of us when our desires are frustrated, and what an alternate, God-honoring response would be. 
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“Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you” (Colossians 3:13)

This past Sunday I shared from Matthew 18 about forgiving those who have hurt us.  There are few things harder in life than extending forgiveness to someone who has wounded us, because to forgive someone is essentially to suffer twice.  The first time, you suffer because of something that is done to you; the second time, you willingly choose to suffer by forgiving instead of making the other person suffer by taking revenge on them.  But in the end, forgiveness is the only way to freedom, the only way to not let our heart become hard or our spirit become bitter and angry. 

Forgiveness is a process, one that can take years for the person who has endured significant abuse or betrayal at the hands of another person.  I ended this past week’s sermon by encouraging everyone to take a step towards forgiving another person, and gave five possible steps to take.  I wanted to use this space to elaborate on that by briefly sharing about eight possible steps that you take towards forgiveness and freedom.
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This week’s guest blogger is Jim Quigley.  Jim has been a part of NewLife since last August, after moving up from New Jersey, and is an engineer who also works with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes at Trinity College.

The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.”  But Jonah ran away from the LORD and headed for Tarshish.
-Jonah 1:1-3

The Book of Jonah does not waste any time getting down to business.  It starts off with God calling Jonah to do something, followed by Jonah’s disobedience and attempt to flee from the Lord.  All of this in the first three verses.  God was calling Jonah to preach to the wicked people of Nineveh and to inform them of their sinful nature.  But instead of following the Lord’s command and possibly leading a city to repentance, Jonah decides to flee as far as possible in the opposite direction to Tarshish, a city thought to be in south eastern Spain.  Why did Jonah not answer the Lord’s call?  And why did he think that he could even flee from God and His calling? 
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A man’s wisdom gives him patience; it is to his glory to overlook an offense. (Proverbs 19:11)

If there were ever a verse that has been my unintentional life verse, it is Proverbs 19:11.  I have forever been the “that’s okay” guy, shrugging it off as people do everything short of taking a baseball bat to my car.  “Stole my wallet?  That’s okay.”  “Punched me in the face?  No big deal.”  “Burned my house down?  That’s alright – I’ll get another.”  Overlooking offenses is what I do.

Case in point:  when I was a youth pastor, I was blessed to have some very large high school kids as part of the youth group which met at my house.  Read more »

Over the past two days, there have been two events which have caused serious reflection on the second most important relationship in my life (after God).  The first happened Sunday night, when I read of a young pastor of a fast-growing evangelical church who had resigned that morning due to an emotional and physical affair he had gotten into with his assistant.  News like this is always devastating to me, as it is agonizing to see how years of service to God can be undone in a moment by sinful choices.  It reconfirmed in me the need to guard myself against compromising situations, and reminded me of how Satan will come hardest as the leaders of a church, because he knows that if he can take them out, the whole thing will be shaken.  I know that Michele and I would covet your prayers and your support in making sure that our marriage and family are protected.   

Most importantly, however, that event reminded me how much I love my wife and how desperately I never want something like that to happen to our family.  Read more »

Father’s Day is fast approaching, and I want to pass along to the men of the congregation a sermon by Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle called “Marriage and Men,” based on 1 Peter 3:7 (you can watch the sermon at http://www.marshillchurch.org/media/trial/marriage-and-men).  Pastor Driscoll is becoming more and more influential and widely known, usually for his Calvinist theology, his macho man image and depiction of a manly Jesus, and for occasionally crossing the line into inappropriate or crude humor.  But one thing I have always admired in him is that he appears to me of a man who knows how to love and protect his wife, love and train up his children in the Lord, and teach immature men what it means to be a real man – not a macho American man or an immature wanna-be man, but a man like Jesus.

The one word Pastor Driscoll uses to sum up what it means to be a man is this:  Read more »

One of my favorite quotes comes from the C.S. Lewis book The Four Loves, an exploration of affection, friendship, eros, and charity.  In his section on friendship, he uses an illustration about his relationship with two of his closest friends, “Charles” and “Ronald” (J.R.R. Tolkien) to make a larger point about the importance of Christian fellowship to our knowledge of God.  This is how Lewis puts it:

In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out.  By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.  Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke.  Far from having more of Ronald, having him ‘to myself’ now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.  Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves.  Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend.  They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, ‘Here comes one who will augment our loves’… In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious ‘nearness by resemblance’ to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God.  For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest.  That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah’s vision are crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ to one another (Isaiah 6:3).  The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we all have.

There are so many beautiful insights in this passage.  Read more »

I recently completed a sermon series on the Song of Solomon, a beautiful collection of love poems in the Old Testament that have a lot to encourage us about in the areas of love, sex, and romance. My first interaction with this book was back in 2000, when I went through a study on the Song of Solomon that had been done by a Texas pastor named Tommy Nelson with three teenage boys that I was discipling. That study was an excellent and unforgettable time of teaching these teens what it means to love someone Biblically, and is especially meaningful as one of those teens just had his first baby and one of the others is getting married this May.

The impact that study had made on those teens was one of the reasons I wanted to do a sermon series with the whole church. However, as I studied the book, read commentaries, and listened to other sermons on the Song of Solomon, I found myself moving away from the Tommy Nelson-style of preaching, which in many ways treated the book as a how-to manual for Biblical love, dating, and marriage. Read more »

 “Have you found anyone special yet?” 

“Gone on any dates recently?”

“So, when are you going to get married?” 

Are there any more annoying questions for the single person than these (usually asked by well-meaning relatives, of course)?  It is not easy to be single, especially in a world that sees marriage as something to which all normal and reasonable normal people should aspire.  And the church does not always help, often focusing heavily on married families and causing the unmarried to feel pretty invisible.

But the Biblical perception of singlehood is far different and much more respectful.  Read more »

We are two weeks into a seven week series on the Song of Solomon in our Sunday services, and my goal has been to both communicate the message of this unique book (or collection of love songs) and to use it as a springboard to communicate the Biblical view on love, sex, and marriage.  There are so many harmful messages out there on all three of those topics that I believe have contributed to a culture that is littered with broken marriages, aborted children, rampant pornography, and general chaos in the romantic realm.  As difficult as it can be to preach on these topics in church, I strongly believe that it would be worse to remain silent and hope that people can sift through the cultural messages on their own.
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