Be gone, sorrow, sickness, wheelchairs, and cancer! Enough of you, screams of fear and nights of horror! Death, you die! Life, you reign!

Sometimes I wonder if we don't see Christ's love as much in the people he tolerated as in the pain he endured.

God offers authentic LOVE. His devotion is the real deal. But He won't give you the genuine until you surrender the imitations.

It works well for me to go ahead and prepare the sermon with a chapter in mind. What that does is to force me to be very thrifty in my language, tighten up my words and not ramble so much. It puts some fiber in the sermon.

What does a life without anxiety look like? With God as your helper, you'll sleep better tonight and smile more tomorrow. You'll reframe the way you face your fears. You'll learn how to talk yourself off the ledge, view bad news through the lens of sovereignty, discern the lies of Satan, and tell yourself the truth. You'll discover a life that's characterized by calm and will develop tools for facing the onslaughts of anxiety.

I think the hardest questions had to do with suffering. It had to do with all of our church members and friends passing through difficult times. Sometimes it's the global climate: tsunamis, earthquakes, radiation. I think these kinds of questions are absolutely the most difficult, yet we need to be ready to respond to them because we have to be able as pastors to walk people through these valleys, these tough times in their lives.

Thats usually what I gravitate to, I read The Perfect Storm, then I read Into Thin Air .