…Things Are Upside Down? “These people who have turned the world upside down have come here also.” Acts 17:6 Jesus was sort of upside-down. The last will be first. We will find our life when we lose it. The one who humbles himself will be exalted. The ancient world even
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If there isn’t a God, we better fret and worry and expend all our energy figuring out what to do. But if there is a God, perhaps the most important thing we can do is to stop and listen. In the “Upside Down Training” we do at Graffiti, we sometimes
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My mother used to recite the lines of a poem when we needed to stop and enjoy. It went like this: “What is this world if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?” I can see my brother stretching out his legs and putting his hands
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“No one will ever complain if you stop your sermon five minutes early,” my wife used to tell me. I was at a meeting of pastors recently where a series of people were each given two minutes to talk. Each successive pastor took longer and longer and longer. I slowly
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You are the salt of the earth. But what good is salt if it has lost its flavor? Matthew 5: 13 NLT The elevator door opened and the smell of a Puerto Rican feast greeted me. She’s cooking again! I sighed, breathing in my sweet neighbor’s cooking. The scent of
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We have been talking about abundance at church. Abundance can’t just mean outer circumstances. We all know about the misery of some wealthy people, suicides in mansions, overdoses by the outwardly beautiful. Some of the most abundant people I have ever known, always having something to give, have been people
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William Carey was a missionary who worked tirelessly as a linguist and established a strong foundation for many Bible translations and educational facilities in India. He is the one who had the motto, “Expect great things from God, attempt great things for God.” But my favorite quote from William Carey
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January is a good time to take stock and look ahead. I suppose in some way we all want to have a productive year. We want to be sure to “get things done.” But it is important to stop before we start, and ask ourselves what we want to get
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You can’t see the picture when you are inside the frame. Any coming break from the normal routine gives us a chance to step outside the picture of our lives in some way or other. Yesterday our groups spent some time talking about discipline when Paul told Timothy that Paul
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This month we are focusing on the last letter that Paul wrote, according to many scholars–2 Timothy. In it, he gives some hard-nosed instructions to a young man. Among other things, the letter talks about how a person should live. I heard someone say last week, “When I come before
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