If you know me well enough, you probably know that I don’t really follow baseball, I can’t give you any stats about the players or the teams that they play for, nor do I honestly care, but I do enjoy a good game and all that come with it (beer, hot dogs, friends, etc.) and watching people and their responses to the game....

There is silence. Everyone’s mouths are closed and a single vocalist steps up to the microphone. She takes a deep breath and releases an effortless stream of pure tone. This audio-joy fills the room and the beauty cleans you from the inside out. This is a picture of what the Church is like. She gets to sing a beautiful message to the world about Jesus. That message is...

D.A. Carson, Tim Keller, N.T. Wright, Mark Driscoll, etc.: they all say this in one way or another. Why do they all agree? Because the Bible is so clear about this principle. In some ways, the whole story of the Bible’s conflict after Genesis 3, that is the theme of sin, is really the conflict between the worship of idols (created things) and the worship of the true god ...

The Oxford dictionary will tell you that the English word “worship” is derived from the old English weorthscipe, which means ‘worthiness, acknowledgement of worth’. It denotes anything that is of supreme worth or value. Obviously, that’s not where the Greek, Aramaic, or Hebrew word comes from, but that’s another blog post for another day. The point here is that...

Around 2000 years ago this was the type of question the one woman used to sidetrack a conversation she was having with Jesus (John 4). The scene is pure genius on Jesus’s part. This is classic Messiah-stuff. He follows her rabbit trail and brings it back around to the point he wanted to make all along. Love it. It’s funny how Christians in the west still bring up that ...

Some fifty years ago, John F. Kennedy gave his famous Inaugural Speech. The line “ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country” is easily identified. It was a call to sacrifice and service. As an American this is a call that we still need to hear. In a country that is showing an ever-increasing entitlement attitude, it is a needed c...

Our gospel-centered relationships must reflect this truth. We were once broken and sinful and in need of a Savior (the Fall). Christ has redeemed us by his blood (Redemption). This points us toward how we should now live (New Creation). This is “new creation living.” Our relationships should reflect the way relationships will be in the New Heavens and New Earth....

Again, living in true community together magnifies our need for a Savior. The beauty of the gospel is that it not only restores our relationship with our creator God but it restores our relationships with one another as well....

A proper understanding of sin also points to the fact that relationships are messy. When people live in community together it is no different. Actually, it magnifies our sin and our need for a Savior. This brings us to the nucleus of Gospel-Centered Relationships....

Community. It sounds like a really great word, doesn’t it? We all crave it. We are all part of different kinds of communities. We dream of or deeply desire a perfect, almost utopian kind of community. We have all experienced at one time or another a community that has been rich, meaningful, life-altering and something to work towards. But here is the reality: community i...