When you teach on a familiar text, you're capitalizing on common knowledge. When you teach on an unfamiliar text, you're having to build a bridge of understanding, and we need to do that as well.

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. To these I commit my day.

I believe a personal relationship with God is healthy, but organized religion has potential for danger, in whatever faith.

Democracy is the right choice and is the greatest form of government ever created.

My first encounters with faith came about the time I was a Boy Scout, at about 14 or 15. I made the logical deduction that they operate the same way; I treated my faith like earning a merit badge, and everything about Christianity was about earning merit badges.

Just as your earthly house is a place of refuge, so God's house is a place of peace.

I think you could say every pastor is writing this book, Max on Life; for many it just never gets published. All I did was collect a few of the questions I've been asked through the years, write up a brief response and put them in this publication.