Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Monday, June 22, 2026
A LETTER TO MY CHURCH FAMILY
- Many of our people will be at our summer conference in Green Lake, Wisconsin. Let's pray for God to do great things in our people and in the others that will be there.
- Linda and I will be home in Monroe, and at Redeemer. I will preach this coming Sunday morning out of Hebrews 10:26-39. I encourage you to look at these verses before coming on Sunday.
- WE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO LIVE STREAM THIS COMING SUNDAY'S SERVICE. We have three people who do this on Sunday mornings. Two of them will be at Green Lake, and the third is unavailable.
- ALL CHILDREN'S CHURCH CLASSES ARE STAFFED AND WILL BE OPEN. Thank you, teachers and helpers! Thank you, Jana and Dayna for setting this up!
Sunday, June 21, 2026
Influence: Like Father, Like Child
(My mother and Father)
Influence is greater than numbers. The question is not, "How big is your church?" The real question is, "How is your church's influence?"
You could be twelve people, and salt the world with the good news of the Kingdom. You could be twelve hundred, and be an audience inside a saltshaker.
How is your influence going? Which way is it going?
Every father influences his children, for worse, or for better. My father influenced me for better.
I remember seeing Dad read his Bible, usually in the evening before he went to bed. Dad read his Bible so much that his thumb wore through the leather cover. I have it now. Here it is.
I received my own leather-covered Bible when I was confirmed in our Lutheran Church. I was twelve years old. My mother put my Bible somewhere - I didn't know where and I did not care. I never picked it up and read it.
Until I was 21. That's when Jesus rescued me out of a deep enslavement to evil. My life began to change for the better! And, I needed a Bible.
I drove to my parents' home. I asked, "Mom, do you know where my Bible is?"
She got it for me. I began to read. And read. I wore the leather out on it so much that the cover finally broke off. I still have this Bible. Here it is.
Like father, like child, right?
As the apostle Paul wrote:
Saturday, June 20, 2026
God Is Wrathful Because God Is Love
Surely a loving God does not affirm everything.
Yale theologian Miroslav Volf personally witnessed the horrors of the Bosnian war. Out of this context he wrote,
I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days!
How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.
Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, (Zondervan 2005) pp. 138-139
Friday, June 19, 2026
"Relevant" Is Not a Kingdom Word
(Worship at Redeemer)
- closely connected or appropriate to what is being done or considered.
"what small companies need is relevant advice"synonyms: pertinent, applicable, apposite, material, apropos, to the point, germane;
- appropriate to the current time, period, or circumstances; of contemporary interest.
E.g., "Critics may find themselves unable to stay relevant in a changing world"
In Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance, Os Guinness writes that, in our uncritical pursuit of relevance, Christians have actually become irrelevant. By our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more in line with the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and significance.
The Idol of Relevance turns on us and emasculates us. The Church becomes domesticated. We become one of Relevance's pets. Aslan may not be a tame lion, but we are.
Is that too strong? Watch the secular media see if the Church and its leaders appear as anything more than just another evil to be eradicated. It's as if Jesus said, I came not to be served, but to serve the American dream. (This is also called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.)
Peterson writes:
"Our place in society is, in some ways, unique: no one else occupies this exact niche that looks so inoffensive but is in fact so dangerous to the status quo. We are committed to keeping the proclamation alive and to looking after souls in a soul-denying, denying, soul-trivializing age. But it isn't easy. Powerful forces, both subtle and obvious, attempt either to domesticate pastors to serve the culture as it is or to seduce us into using our position to become powerful and important on the world's terms.: (Ib., Kindle Locations 67-70)
Thursday, June 18, 2026
Free to Not Be Who I Am
(On The Badger, crossing Lake Michigan)
Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself
yet to have taken hold of it.
But one thing I do: Forgetting
what is behind and straining toward what is ahead,
I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which
God has called me heavenward in Christ
Jesus.
All of us, then, who are mature should take
such a view of things.
And if on some point you think
differently, that too God will make clear to you.
Philippians 3:13-15
When I was a campus pastor at Michigan State University in the 1980s I had many
meetings with new students. I would begin the conversation by asking them,
"Tell me, who are you?"
When I was a college freshman I could not answer this question. I think back
and remember how others viewed me. I was...
...drug user
...alcohol abuser
...failure
...party animal
...stupid
I didn't let others see my insides. Even if I wanted to reveal my heart I was
unable because I never addressed the self-question, never asked "Who am
I..., really?"
Looking back I see myself as...
...insecure
...lonely
...lacking confidence
...unaware
...easily manipulated
...phony
...duplicitous
...lost
Outwardly, especially when I was drunk, I celebrated who I was. Inwardly, the
party was over. I was mired in the Eriksonian "identity crisis," a prisoner
caught between ego identity and role confusion.
Looking back, should I have celebrated this? No way! Should I have
"accepted who I was?" No, thank God.
Don't celebrate who you are. Instead, look at what you were meant to be. You
need more change (as do I).
If you are a Jesus-follower celebrate Christ, not the "you" that you
are now. You have been purposed to be like Christ. He is the paradigm of true
humanity.
God wants to set you free from this world's current identity confusion. What
you can be and be transformed into is what matters, not the current
"you" that others or you think you are. This is no small matter. Your
answer to this will influence everything you do in life. And contrary to how
our identity-celebrating culture embraces this, it is not easy.
In the winter of 1970 I was on a stage in the Chicago area playing my guitar in
a band in front of a small crowd. That's when my release from who I was began.
The thought came to me, "I am screwed up." When I heard it I didn't
feel condemned. I felt truth. That's when the voices of friends who said they
liked "me" and thought I was "fun" began to lose their
influence.
Every rescue begins with repentance. A few days after this I looked away from
my self and began to look at Jesus. I was being set free, not to be who I was,
but what I was always meant to be.
Friday, June 12, 2026
Change Yourself, Change Your Marriage
Linda and I, over our fifty-thrree years of marriage, have met with many premarital; and marital couples. A percentage of these meetings concern couples who are talking about ending the marriage.
One resource we draw on is Gary Chapman's book One More Try: What to Do When Your Marriage Is Falling Apart.
Here's some wisdom from the book, which Linda and I share (as do many marital counselors).
"It has been said that unhappy marriages consist of unhappy people. You may not be able to change your spouse, but you can change yourself.
Marriages fail for three primary reasons:
lack of an intimate relationship with God,
lack of an intimate relationship with your mate,
or lack of an intimate understanding and acceptance of yourself.
One might think we would begin with our relationship to God, but the fact is, one’s relationship with God is greatly affected by one’s self-understanding. This time should be used as an opportunity to rediscover your own assets and liabilities as a person and to take positive steps in personal growth. Even if you are not separated but are struggling with a marriage in crisis, it is possible—indeed, necessary—to look deeply at yourself and begin to make some changes." (P. 41)
Monday, June 08, 2026
Let Not Your Hearts Be Agitated
(In Kenya)
Thomas Merton wrote: "We have a vocation
not to be disturbed by the turmoil and wreckage of the great fabric of
illusions." (A Book of Hours, 56)
We have a vocation...
A calling. We have a calling.
From God. God calls us.
... not to be disturbed...
To not be agitated.
This is about the heart.
Washing machines have "agitators." They move back and forth, back and
forth, with force. They are going nowhere. They make no forward progress.
Disturbances halt forward progress. Disturbances interrupt the calling.
Jesus said, "Let not your hearts be agitated."
ταράσσω,v \{tar-as'-so}
1) to agitate, trouble (a thing, by the movement of its parts to and fro)
1a) to cause one inward commotion, take away his calmness of mind,
disturb his equanimity 1b) to disquiet, make restless 1c) to stir
up 1d) to trouble 1d1) to strike one's spirit with fear and
dread 1e) to render anxious or distressed 1f) to perplex the mind
of one by suggesting scruples or doubts
...by the turmoil...
Let not your hearts be agitated by the agitation. By the upheaval. By
the irruptions. By the roiling waters.
Let not your hearts be arrested by the peace-thieves.
...by the wreckage...
Do not be captivated by the incessant effluence of cultural carnage.
Put a compress on the bleeding media.
...the great fabric of illusions.
The systematic sham that is "the world."
With all its pretension and arrogance.
Do not let this world interpret you.
We have a calling from God to remain in Christ where agitation and turmoil
are not to be found and the great fabric of systemic spell-casting is broken.
Friday, June 05, 2026
Metaphor Theory (My Dissertation)
Today I was reading some things about metaphors. My doctoral dissertation (450 pages!) was on metaphor theory. I spent six+ years writing it, in the days of no internet.
No AI, as well.
I was thinking, does AI know anything about my work in metaphor theory? I typed it into AI and got this.
***
Dr. John Piippo’s metaphor theory explores the nature of figurative and metaphorical truth, establishing that human experience cannot be fully contained by literal speech. Piippo, an American philosopher, theologian, and author, completed his doctoral dissertation on this exact subject at Northwestern University in 1986.
- The Failure of "Literal Language": Piippo frequently asserts that the vast majority of deep human experience cannot be captured in what he calls the "steel nets of literal language". Literal descriptions are too rigid to encapsulate complex realities like consciousness, emotional states, and spirituality. [1]
- Frameworks for Reality: He defines a metaphor as the use of a word, phrase, image, or object to construct a specific cognitive framework. This framework dictates how we perceive, filter, and express an aspect of reality. []
- Cognitive and Reality-Shaping Power: Heavily influenced by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and modern cognitive scientists like Lera Boroditsky, Piippo argues that the semantic structures and metaphors we use genuinely shape and limit our thoughts. Metaphors frame how we see the world, meaning that changing a culture's metaphors changes its view of reality. [1]
- Metaphorical Truth as Factual: Drawing from theologians like Wolfhart Pannenberg, Piippo argues that a metaphor can be used to communicate an absolute, objective fact. Because certain events or truths contain "more meaning" than literal language can hold, metaphorical expression is the only way to convey their full weight. [1]
Thursday, June 04, 2026
Spiritual Formation Bibliography
 |
| Payne Theological Seminary |
This is especially for my current Spiritual Formation students.
This is the biblography I use in my seminary teachings.
I have highlighted in bold italics books that I think are especially relevant to prayer, listening to God, and spiritual formation and transformation.
CAUTION: You'll learn more by actually engaging in a life of prayer and experiencing spiritual formation than you will by reading books on the subject. Yet there are some books that help us interpret and understand what's been going on after we've just spent six weeks of praying.
Campolo, Tony, and Darling, Mary Albert. The God of Intimacy and Action: Reconnecting Ancient Spiritual Practices, Evangelism, and Justice. Nicely puts together the spiritual disciplines and social activism.
Cone, James. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Reading this book broke my heart, hopefully enough and in the right place.
Foster. Sanctuary of the Soul: Journey Into Meditative Prayer. This was Leadership Journal's 2011 Book of the Year.
McKnight, Scot. Fasting: The Ancient Practices. An excellent introduction to biblical fasting. McKnight's breakdown of the pattern of biblical fasting is very helpful.
Nouwen. The Only Necessary Thing: Living a Prayerful Life.
Wilmore, Gayraud S. Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans. James Cone calls this "the most important textbook on the history of black religion and the black church ever written."