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“Whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant; and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be slave of all.” (Mark 10:43-44)

What is the highest and most lofty thing you can aspire to as a person? Different people have different senses of what their ceiling is. For some, the sky’s the limit. For others, they don’t think they can reach quite so high. The truth is, whether your highest goal is something like becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or to something less ambitious, we must always allow the words of Jesus to keep us grounded in reality. For him, the highest of aspirations wasn’t to be great, as in some worldly sense of greatness. Rather, real greatness is when the goodness of God – that which is pure, and holy, and selfless – permeates all we are and takes root deep in our hearts. Continue reading To Be Good or To Be Great →

He spent the whole night in prayer to God. (Luke 6:12)

Have you ever taken the time to perform a relationship audit of your life, thinking deeply about the many different kinds of associations you have? If you have, you probably noticed that you can generally divide all the people you know into different categories. There are those closest to you, such as a spouse, sibling, or your very best friend/s. Then there’s your larger group of friends, people you enjoy being around and spending time with every now and then. Beyond that are acquaintances, people you know and might be friendly with, but you’re not exactly friends in any sort of meaningful way. I think you get my point: there are different layers to the relationships we have in life. This is true for pretty much every person alive. Continue reading The Defining Relationship →

Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men. (Mark 1:17)

There is a striking honesty about Jesus’ call. When he calls us to come follow him, it’s never to come do something he isn’t already doing, nor is it to come be something he isn’t already himself. His call to all who would follow him is a calling to himself ‒ to come and be what he is, to come and do what he does. If Jesus had been a general, he would have called these first followers to become soldiers. If he had been a scholar, he would have recruited them to his school. But Jesus’ interest in people is not military or academic; he wants people’s hearts. He wants to cast a net into the world and draw as many people to himself as he can, and he invites his followers to come join him in this endeavor. Continue reading Jesus the Master Fisher of Men →

When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. (John 1:37)

Sometimes I chuckle when I see how my English Bible translates a passage of Scripture. It can be challenging to properly capture the essence of the original Greek, hence why we have so many translations in print today. One such example is in John 1:38 when Andrew and John (the disciple) left John the Baptist to follow Jesus. The NASB renders the passage as follows: “Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, ‘What do you want?’” Now, growing up as the youngest of four children I heard that question A LOT. “What do YOU want?” In other words, “Why on earth are YOU here? Go away!” That’s what it looks like Jesus is saying to these two who desire to follow him, but the reality couldn’t be more different. Continue reading What Do You Want? →

Whenever we gather together to partake of the Lord’s Supper, I am automatically drawn to primitive Wesleyan hymnody as a helpful guide for how to approach the sacrament. While the tendency seems to be to relegate the Lord’s Supper to something marginal in the life of the church, to the Wesleys and the early Methodists it was actually central to life in the body of Christ. Consider this stanza from Hymns on the Lord’s Supper on how the sacrament is the Lord’s “choicest instrument” to convey his blessings on people: Continue reading The Lord’s Choicest Instrument of Grace →