Renew

My wife, Heather, once said that our marriage is the most beautiful, most broken thing she has ever experienced. I concur. I still think that Dave Harvey wrote When Sinners Say 'I Do' about us. I'm not sure what either one of us was expecting when we entered marital bliss, but I do know that we both got a whole lot more than we bargained for. Paul Tripp wrote a wonderful book called What Did You Expect? for those of us who woke up after the honeymoon and wondered (though we would never say it outloud), "Who is this person next to me and what happened to the person I married?!" Tripp explains how he approaches marriage with the gospel: My whole approach to marriage is the Gospel, because I’ve got to understand that marriage is about a flawed person living next to a flawed person in a fallen world, but with a faithful God. So, I can’t look to my husband or wife to be my own personal messiah. No one is ever married to the fourth member of the trinity. There...

For a number of years now, I've been trying to re-emphasize the importance of outreach at the church I pastor. More specifically, I've been trying to move everyone toward engaging in evangelism. Whenever I bring up the subject, I hear someone say (sometimes audibly), "Oh no! Not evangelism!" The word conjures up images of street preachers or door-to-door witnessing that has all but been abandoned by everyone except "cult" groups. Perhaps another approach is needed. We can start by defining what evangelism is. What I mean by evangelism is simply speaking about the gospel of Jesus Christ--everything from "preaching the gospel to ourselves" (as Jack Miller and Tim Keller put it) to bringing up God (or more specifically God's work for us in Christ) in conversation with those who are disinterested or curious or in open rebellion against him. There has been a mixed response to my attempts at getting us back to this essential part of the mission. Some...