“So you’re tellin’ me there’s a chance?!” In 1994, the movie Dumb and Dumber had every high schooler in America quoting that line and dreaming of riding a moped to Aspen, Colorado. At the time, my friend Tim was about to enter his senior year of high school in Raleigh, NC. For the past three years of high school, Tim had been mentored and discipled by a youth leader named Eric. Eric was in his...
During an especially draining season of life, I discovered information that led me to ask Curtis how he was doing in the area of sexual purity. He quickly confessed that he was struggling. This was not the first time in the battle against porn that we had cycled through this miserable scenario, but it turned out to be one of the most painful for me. Even before he confessed his sin, circumstances...
We sat across from one another at a taco place in west Nashville talking about life, our faith, and the suffering I was enduring so early in my teenage life. Just days earlier my brother had been in a tragic accident, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. My life was spinning out of control, and I wasn’t sure what to do, where to go, or who to talk to. And that’s when Rick invited me out for...
Isaiah 49 is a mountain-peak passage. Once you’ve climbed it, you just have to pause at the top and take in the view. So I want us to look at the summit of this passage, verses 14–16, because it gives us the most wonderful assurance that nothing in life could ever make God forget us. Of course, that’s not how the exiles in Babylon feel. God has just spoken of his coming servant who will restore...
Over the past few years, something about our culture has changed. We all sense it, though we can’t always put it into words. Some say we’ve moved from a world that’s neutral toward Christianity to a more “negative world.” Others say we’re living through the slow death of Enlightenment liberalism. Still others assert that Western society is now fully post-Christian. Whatever you call it, what we...
