Critics of Christianity claim that real men have a hard time connecting to the church. It’s too effeminate. It’s too introspective. It’s too touchy feely, they say. But we see real men all over the Bible, and John the Baptist was one of them. Speaking about John, Jesus basically said in Matthew 11, you didn’t come to see some soft, preppy dude…

Have you ever had a moment where you doubted who Jesus is? Sometimes even the strongest among us in the faith have moments of weakness and doubt. When you think of giants in the faith, John the Baptist has to be in that discussion. And guess what:  even he had a moment of doubt. And so he sent messengers to Jesus to…

Have you ever heard it said that Jesus is the Prince of Peace? Well, He certainly is. But that doesn’t mean that those of us who follow Him will always experience peace on this earth. No, sadly, Jesus is a dividing line. He makes this clear in Matthew 10. There will be those who will say, well, if you’re going to follow…

Just keeping it real, being a Christian is not always safe. Jesus makes that clear in Matthew 10. If they called our Lord and Savior the devil, what will they call us? If they crucified Him, what won’t they do to us? A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. Jesus, to his credit, never hid these…

Jesus had lots of disciples, but there were 12 that he chose to be especially close to him. We read their names in Matthew 10:2-4, “…Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Zealot,…

Back in 2006, my wife’s youngest brother signed up to be a part of a harvesting crew that that farmers would contract to help harvest crops out west. They started down in Texas and would work their way north to Montana, harvesting wheat, corn, soybeans, and whatever you could harvest with a big John Deere combine. Those farmers depended on these contracted…

Albert Einstein famously said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Would you like to reach the next generation for Christ? Then we can’t just keep doing things the same way over and over. If we want to do a new thing like reaching the next generation for Christ, we have to do it in…

What is your greatest need? If you had asked the paralyzed man in Matthew 9, he would likely have said being able to walk again was his greatest need. Being lame had undoubtedly made his life incredibly difficult. So, he and his friends worked a plan to get him to Jesus for healing. But upon arrival, instead of focusing on his paralysis,…