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,

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

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