There's a saying in our culture: "Not my circus, not my monkeys." It's a helpful reminder that we aren't the authority in every situation. If someone else's kids are acting up, it's not my job to discipline them. If store employees aren't doing their jobs, it's not up to me to manage them, since I'm not their boss. If there's small-town drama I'm not part of, I might grab the popcorn, but I won't interfere. Not my circus, not my monkeys. But what if it is my circus? What if t

The Teacher looks at two options and tells us which one wins. And by the end of the chapter, those four observations add up to something much bigger: a diagnosis of exactly how a society falls apart, and a map for how to walk it back.

There's an instinctual drive in all of us to reach for something beyond ourselves. Across history and every inhabited continent, people have searched for the eternal, the divine, the unseen force behind everything we experience. Everybody worships something. Greek Gods and Sack Lunches I've always had a fascination with religion. One of my all-time favorite Disney movies is Hercules. When my wife Katelyn and I studied abroad in Greece during college, we had to learn the Greek

I have a riddle for you, straight from Tolkien's "The Hobbit," the chapter called Riddles in the Dark. It's the last one Gollum poses to Bilbo: This thing all things devours: birds, beasts, trees, flowers. Gnaws iron, bites steel, grinds hard stones to meal. Slays kings, ruins towns, and beats high mountains down. You probably already shouted the answer: time. We're continuing our series in Ecclesiastes, and Ecclesiastes 3 is the great time poem of Scripture, the one that ins

If you visit my office, you'll notice something about me pretty quickly. I'm a bit nostalgic, and I'm a big nerd. Combine those two facts and it makes sense why I surround myself with toys and memorabilia from my favorite childhood fandoms: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, The Legend of Zelda, and more. Many of us do something similar. For you it might not be sci-fi, fantasy, and video games. It might be reminders of the sports teams you grew

If you've ever felt like you're grinding your gears just to stay in place, you're in good company. The Teacher of Ecclesiastes, the one who calls himself Qohelet, "one who gathers," went looking for an answer to one big question: what does a person actually gain for all the work they do under the sun? In Ecclesiastes 1:12 through 2:26, he sets out to test that question for himself. Not in theory, but in practice. He goes on what I'd call an unfulfilling journey through three

Have you ever been handed a job, given all the right supplies, and still had no idea what you were doing? When I was in middle school and high school, I attended a private Christian school in Tennessee. Every summer, the school offered "work study" hours for students, matching them with various jobs around campus. Some worked in the preschool or elementary daycare. Others stayed inside to clean offices or file papers. My job was mostly outside. We ran weed eaters, cleared the

Tell someone you're preaching through Ecclesiastes, and you'll usually get the same response: "Oh, that's a downer." Fair enough. But it's also not that simple. Here's what I've come to see in this strange little book: where you stand determines what you see. Ecclesiastes is almost a mirror. If you're wired toward pessimism, the eternal Debbie Downer, you'll find plenty here to confirm it. If you're wired toward optimism, always looking for the silver lining, you'll find that

In my personal ranking of Jesus' parables, three stories are always fighting for the top spot: the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, and the Rich Man and Lazarus. Which one lands at number one changes depending on the day, but all three share something in common. They present great reversals, subverting our expectations and flipping the script on how we assume these stories should go. The priest should be the one to help the half-dead man on the road. If not him, then surely

from the sermon "The Surprise of a Spoiled Man" by Jimmy Johnson There was a certain rich man, splendidly clothed in purple and fine linen, who lived in luxury every single day. At his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered in sores, longing for the scraps that fell from the rich man's table. Dogs came and licked his wounds. That's the story Jesus tells in Luke 16:19-31, and it's not a light passage. It's a hard one. But it's a good one, and it's worth deeply thinking abo

The parables Jesus tells in Matthew 24-25 all point to the same call: stay prepared, stay engaged, stay ready. We never know when the end will come. Like a soccer match ticking into stoppage time, we don't know when the final whistle will blow. And just as only the referee knows when a match is officially over, only God the Father knows when the end will come. Jesus himself says as much: "Now concerning that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven nor the Son,

If you have ever watched a soccer match, you know the frustration. There is no clock counting down. Instead, it counts up, and only one person on the entire pitch, the referee, knows exactly how much time is left. At the end of a half, he holds up a sign with a number on it: 6 added minutes, 7, sometimes as high as 11. Where did all that time go? That was stoppage time, every moment play stopped for a foul, an injury, or a celebration, tracked and added back on. Americans ten

One of my all time favorite bands is Relient K, a Christian punk-pop band that got its start in the late 90s and is still around today. My favorite song of theirs, "Be My Escape" (released in 2004), is about how God wants to set us free when we feel trapped, often in prisons of our own making. There's a line in the second verse that has shaped my faith more than almost any other song I know. And this life sentence that I'm serving I admit that I'm every bit deserving But the

based on the sermon preached by Lucas Johnson as part of our Plot Twist Series. The main text is Matthew 20:1-16 You ever build something with a hundred little parts, the kind of thing that comes with three types of screws and each one only fits in a certain spot? Up close it looks right. Then you step back and something's off. That's what this parable did to me for years. On first read, it seems simple enough. But the more I sat with it, compared it to other passages, and th

Fifteen years ago, Kathryn Schulz gave one of the most quietly devastating TED Talks I've ever watched. It's called "On Being Wrong," and the whole talk hinges on one question: what does it feel like to be wrong? Her answer: it feels like being right. That idea has stuck with me for years, and I've come back to it again and again, including when I studied the Parables of Lost Things in Luke 15 (being lost can feel like you're on the right path). But I think it applies just as

Back in high school, my friends and I discovered a website called despair.com. If you've never seen it, they make "demotivational" posters, the opposite of those cheesy office posters with a mountain range and a word like PERSEVERANCE underneath it. Despair.com's version of that, under a picture of a struggling penguin, reads: "Until you spread your wings, you'll have no idea how far you can walk." Another one of my favorites is called 'Mistakes.' It says, "It could be that t

The Parable of the Man Who Fell Among Robbers, better known as the Good Samaritan, is one of the all-time great stories. When rabbis and Bible scholars speak about "turning the diamond," this is one story we can turn over and over, seeing something new from every angle. That's why it has stood the test of time and still changes hearts and minds today. So let's look at this story from a few different angles. We can learn about receiving help from a would-be villain, about seei

Luke 10:25-37 Something happened during the World Cup that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. A man from Japan ate at a Mexican restaurant for the first time. Before he even ordered, chips and salsa appeared at his table, free and unannounced. He stopped the waiter and said, "We have not yet earned these." The waiter just shrugged. They come with the table. He posted about it online, and what he wrote stopped me cold. He said that in his culture, "hospitality is a de

I believe Luke 15 contains one of the greatest stories ever told. We usually call it the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but that title doesn't quite do it justice. Tim Keller wrote an entire book titled Prodigal God, making the case that the Father is the truly prodigal one. The word "prodigal" means wasteful or extravagant, reckless spending. Keller suggests the Father, in dividing his inheritance and giving whatever the younger son asked, is the reckless one. And that's the k

Here's a question that sounds simple but isn't: what does it feel like to be lost? Most of us jump straight to helpless or frustrated. But that's not quite right. Being lost doesn't feel like being lost. It feels like you're going the right direction. It feels like everything's fine. You think you're on track. I know this from personal experience. I've been lost in a church building, a Walmart, a mall in New Orleans, the streets of Rome, and the roads outside Glacier National