I recently listened to an old country song that I haven’t heard in a long time. It came out the year I graduated high school—Bonnie Rait’s ballad “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” It’s a beautiful melody with absolutely depressing lyrics. It’s a about a woman who keeps going back into the arms of a man that she knows doesn’t love her. And she says, “I can’t make you love me if you don’t You can’t make your heart feel something it won’t Here in the dark, in these final hours I will lay down my heart and I’ll feel the power But you won’t, no you won’t ‘Cause I…

What kind of Christianity is it that desires the fruit but not the root? Is it really Christian for someone to say, “I’ll take Jesus’ gifts—life, social order, morality, beauty, law, the western tradition and western culture—I’ll take all of these gifts from Jesus, but I don’t want Jesus.” What kind of Christianity is that? It’s the kind of “Christianity” that allows you to hate Jesus while insisting that you benefit from his gifts. Some people may call that Christianity by slapping the label “cultural” on the front of it, but might I suggest that such a thing is no Christianity at all. At best, it is a form of…

I don’t know about you, but the older I’ve gotten, the more I have appreciated the gravity of Christmas. As a child, Christmas is all about the presents. It’s all focused on Santa Claus and Christmas morning. As you move into adolescence and young adulthood, you begin to have an appreciation for the entire season, the music, and the traditions. For many, nostalgia about childhood becomes a major part of the celebration. But the older you get the more you pile on experiences that make some of that wear thin. You have friends and family that go in and out of your life–sometimes through broken relationships and sometimes through death.…

One of the most dangerous traps we sinners can fall into is to think about God, to relate to God, or to speak to God as if he were the creature and we were the Almighty. It is exactly this sort of attitude that Jesus confronts in John 5:31-47. In this passage, Jesus explains two actions that are rightly performed by the Deity toward his creatures but must never performed by creatures toward the Deity. John 5:34, “I do not receive testimony from man.” John 5:41, “I do not receive glory from men.” [Hear the rest of the message at the Spotify or Apple links below.]