Thanksgiving has come and gone, but we should seek to maintain a spirit of gratitude. You might have noticed that once again this year, trees, wreaths, lights, and decorations started going up very early as if many have been clamoring, “Bring on Christmas! We need it now!” 2021 has been another challenging year. This past Sunday began the season of Advent, which is the four-week journey to prepare for the birth of Christ. I love the Christmas season because we can feel a sense of hope in the air that is simply......

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The face-to-face connections we have in the church matter. I hope we never take this for granted. We are living in an age of mistrust, suspicion, and alienation. It has been well documented that in American culture, there is growing mistrust of government, political figures, religious institutions, media outlets, vaccines, university ideologies, and a wide array of other things. The result of this mistrust is a growing sense of loneliness, despair, and isolation, all of which were exacerbated by the pandemic. In his book A Time to Build, Yuval Levin makes the......

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Ralph Waldo Emerson famously argued that human beings are hard-wired to worship something: “That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshiping we are becoming.” In his book Counterfeit Gods, Tim Keller defines an idol as, “anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and your imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give. A counterfeit god is anything so......

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