A lot of people are mad at God. People who believe. People who don’t believe. And people who don’t know what they believe. And in Psalm 73, we see Asaph get mad at the way God seems to be mishandling the world.Asaph has been living a self-cont

The Problem of Materialism

3 days ago 36m 40s

Jesus’ teaching about money here is triggered by an event: a Pharisee gets upset that Jesus didn’t wash his hands before he ate his food. The ceremonial washings of the Old Testament were visual aids for the idea that you need to approach God

The Problem of the City

5 days ago 39m 37s

Everyone points to a different reason for why the city has problems. The futurologists will say, “Technology has doomed the city. We don’t need to live in proximity anymore.” The liberals will say, “Racism has doomed the city.” The conservative

The Problem of Guilt

8 days ago 48m 36s

Guilt is a lot like an iceberg. You don’t see much above the surface, but if you really look, you’ll see it’s under everything. So how do you deal with a guilty conscience? In Psalm 51, David has been plunged—through the shock of recognizing t

The Problem of Anxiety

10 days ago 43m 40s

Of the articles and books I survey on worry or anxiety, they almost always say, “The things you’re worried about may never happen. So don’t think about them.” But in Psalm 27, David does the opposite: he visualizes the worst things that can hap

The Search for Values

12 days ago 45m 20s

A Newsweek cover story said that after a 30-year spree, our entire society is waking up with a monstrous hangover, facing a values vacuum. It said that we realize unlimited personal freedom is not the way to build a society, but now we face the

The Search for Identity

15 days ago 48m 21s

When it comes to building up identity and self-esteem, I’m afraid Americans are very pragmatic—and our pragmatism gets to us. Our books and articles say if you want self-esteem, you should lose weight, change your friends, switch your career, a

The Search for Certainty

17 days ago 38m 51s

A fool can be brilliant and a fool can be stupid. Foolishness is not a function of your intelligence. Foolishness is a function of how you use your intelligence. The Bible says every human being is born with a heavy streak of foolishness. It’s

The Search for Transcendence

19 days ago 39m 56s

There is a thirst in the human heart that will not be denied. It cannot be denied. That thirst is for transcendence.Transcendence is intimacy with the infinite. Psalm 63 is about the search for transcendence. It says there is irreducible knowl

The Search for Transcendence

19 days ago 39m 56s

The Search for Substance

22 days ago 42m 24s

A plant without roots is at best a tumbleweed. Is a tumbleweed freer than an oak tree? Yeah, it’s free to be blown about forever. There is what the Bible calls a rootlessness and a weightlessness about our society right now. Many of the proble

The Search for Happiness

24 days ago 43m 39s

Have you in this modern world learned how to become happy and stay happy?I hope you don’t think that’s a trivial question. Because if you read the psychology books, the urban planning books, the biochemistry books, the political science books,

Converted by the Spirit

26 days ago 47m 52s

Jesus, in Matthew 18, uses a word for conversion that means to turn completely around and face in a whole new direction. That’s a perfect image of what Christian conversion really is. Christian conversion is a radical inner transformation. But

Converted by the Resurrection

29 days ago 43m 9s

Christianity was originally never understood as a set of teachings that one took on. Christianity was a power that took you up. It completely turned you inside out, transformed you from the inside. The classic example is the conversion of Paul

Converted by the Cross

Apr 24th, 2024 41m 31s

Conversion is a radical change of life. And in its early days, Christianity grew through conversions. It spread so rapidly that it changed a hostile society completely.What does it mean to become a Christian? By looking at the conversions in A

A Woman, a Slave and a Gentile

Apr 22nd, 2024 44m 9s

Christianity was born into a culture that was every bit as resistant and unsympathetic to its claims as ours is. So how did its message come into the lives of people and actually change them? In Acts, we have more case studies of conversion th

Stay With the Ship

Apr 19th, 2024 42m 56s

The biggest problem people have in believing in God is probably the problem of evil and suffering. In the Greek imagination, the voyage was a metaphor for your life’s journey, and a storm was a metaphor for the evil and suffering and tragedies

No Other Name

Apr 17th, 2024 42m 33s

Christianity was born into a society hostile to its claims. And the claim that was most revolting to that society is also what our society sees as the most repugnant: the shocking claim that salvation is found in no one else.It’s critical to r

To an Unknown God

Apr 15th, 2024 45m 10s

The culture in which Christianity was born was every bit as skeptical of the claims of Christianity as ours is. But the case for Christianity was made so strongly that skeptical people believed in numbers so great that it changed the entire Rom

Many Convincing Proofs

Apr 12th, 2024 42m 3s

It’s a simple fact that in the Greco-Roman world, the claims of Christianity were found every bit as implausible, if not more, than people find them now. So why did so many people believe? Fortunately, we have a case study in Theophilus. How d

The Meaning of the City

Apr 10th, 2024 41m 6s

When the Jewish exiles got to Babylon, they found a huge city—hostile, big, brutal—and it was filled with other exiles, with different people groups and radically different views. Our culture is not so different.Liberals feel our country is so

The Longing for Home

Apr 8th, 2024 40m

We’re not at home. We live in a world that doesn’t sustain or support the deepest needs of our hearts.Martin Heidegger (a fascist sympathizer) and Karl Marx (the father of Communism) were very different, prominent thinkers; yet, they both agre

The Freedom of True Love

Apr 5th, 2024 47m 19s

In a culture where people really don’t know who they are and what life’s about—in a fragmented culture like ours—the fastest way to still feel good about ourselves is romance. It’s the ultimate philosophical narcotic. “I don’t know what life i

The Sickness Unto Death

Apr 3rd, 2024 43m 30s

In a fragmented culture like ours, identity formation is a challenge. We decide our own goals and standards, and we get our sense of worth from whether we can achieve them.Jeremiah shows us that there’s something profoundly disordered and sick

The Necessity of Belief

Apr 1st, 2024 44m 13s

We live in a fragmented culture. There’s no consensus about the big questions of what’s right and wrong and true. Jeremiah is a prophet in this same situation—he lived and wrote in a fragmented culture. One of the challenges of a fragmented cu