We’re halfway through our study on the fruit of the Spirit: so far we’ve considered love, joy, peace, and patience. Now let’s turn our attention to kindness.
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We’re halfway through our study on the fruit of the Spirit: so far we’ve considered love, joy, peace, and patience. Now let’s turn our attention to kindness.
Read More »Ah, Easter: that glorious day marked by egg hunting, honey ham, and zombies.
Wait—what?
Yep. Zombies.
Read More »We’ve just crossed the official threshold of spring. Time to think of warmer days and an early harvest of juicy fruit. Soon the markets will abound with zesty lemons and sweet strawberries, peaches and nectarines, grapes and bananas and oranges. In the spiritual realm, we can keep an eye out for a fresh harvest, too: of love, joy, peace, and now patience.
Read More »He comes on that day to be glorified in His saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed.
(2 Thessalonians 1:10)
I’ll let you in on a little secret about God you may not have heard: He’s a glory hound. He is out for His own fame and praise.
Read More »Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at the radical nature of the fruit of the Spirit. First came love, then joy, and now peace. Since this is one of my personal favorites, let’s get right down to it, shall we?
Read More »If you could time-warp back to middle school and give your younger self some hard-earned wisdom, what would you say? How about high school? College? Your first year of marriage? We all live and learn, usually the hard way.
In honor of Pastor’s Wife Appreciation Month, and because I have a particular heart for planters’ spouses, I thought I might offer a few bits of advice I wish I’d been given on day one of this wild ride, life hacks for simplifying ministry life. (Not that I have it all figured out or do this stuff perfectly. There are probably things the future me will shake her head at and wish the present me could have understood. The present me is still practicing all of this, sometimes awkwardly. Want to practice awkwardly together?)
Read More »Every believer used to be part of an angry apple orchard, just like the one in Oz. Our natural state was to grow bitterness, selfishness, deceit, pride, fear, and a host of other rotting things from the core of who we were, lobbing them at anyone unsavvy enough to pass by. Last week we looked at how the Spirit moves in and produces new fruit in our hearts, fruit we can’t manufacture on our own. We’ve covered love. Let’s turn now to joy: “a delight of the mind, from the consideration of the present or assured approaching possession of a good” (Webster’s 1828 dictionary).
Read More »In my mind, March is the last month of winter (despite the inevitable snow drifts of April in Connecticut). The garden seems to think so, too—daffodil stalks are already peeking through the frozen ground. This is a cold, hard month, both physically and spiritually. Pain lingers here: a cross raises up, and a tomb is prepared. At home, the fireplace roars against the biting wind, but winter knows his days are numbered. To curb my rushing through this final month of nature’s groaning silence, my heart needs a reminder about settling into this moment, this season. Perhaps yours does, too?
Read More »When’s the last time you strolled through an apple orchard hunting for coconuts? Or bananas? Or peaches? Hopefully never. (If you have, we can schedule a time to sit down and talk.) The fruit you’ll find in nature always depends on the seed it sprang from. Unless you intentionally cut off a branch of the apple tree and graft on a new species in its place, that apple tree will only ever produce apples.
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