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My 83-year-old mother has dementia. To help me work through the pain of this living death, I recently gave her a gift she was not able to receive: a letter commemorating her 10th anniversary in the nursing home.

A book I wrote came out today. It's called Life's Biggest Questions: What the Bible Says about the Things That Matter Most (Crossway). I pray it will help people to know God and his truth better.

It is not uncommon to go through periods in life when God feels aloof and unconcerned. Are you facing a time like that now?

SHAME REMOVED; HONOR RECEIVED, PART 3 --Jesus' interactions with people in the Gospel of John...and today This is the third part of a series that looks at events in the Gospel of John in which we find Jesus interacting with various people who need help—physical help and spiritual help. In John 4, Jesus speaks with a Samaritan woman. It is interesting that John records this interaction right after his interaction with Nicodemus. The Samaritan woman could not be more different than Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a male Jew, a Pharisee, a member of the Jewish ruling council, and was Israel’s teacher (3:1, 10). He was the epitome of the best of the best that Israel had to offer.

In my previous post, I reflected on a lesson about humility that I learned as a seminarian. Since then, I have encountered a few folks who have observed that a struggle with spiritual pride is not altogether infrequent in the halls of evangelical seminaries. Initially, seminary might seem an unexpected place to encounter such a struggle. Why is it, then, that this temptation is often found in this context? Is seminary somehow intrinsically antithetical to gospel humility?

Since today is the National Day of Prayer, this blog calls us to consider what it means to pray "big" prayers as we await the soon return of Jesus.

I stand on the walls of Jerusalem As the armies march toward the city I know why they’ve come and what they’ll do And my heart cries out desperately

Because of the propitiation of Christ, God’s wrath is satisfied, and we who were once enemies of God have now received “at-one-ment” or reconciliation.

It was that nightmarish moment that all parents dread deep within their souls. I am staring into the open grave of one of our children. The setting is the cemetery of our family’s hometown in Bolivar, Missouri, where we have just completed the graveside service of our son Christopher. It is an unspeakably painful moment in my life. If I could muster any more tears, I would be uncontrollably weeping as I watch four men struggle to lower a steel vault lid to cover the grave vault holding Christopher’s little white casket. I will see his little smiling face no more. I won’t run my fingers through his beautiful blond hair again. We’ll never snuggle together or touch one another. This is the end. And as I stand there looking into what feels like the abyss, I realize that this could be the most despairing, skeptical, and faithless moment of my life. I feel like I could curse God for emotionally gutting me for the rest of my days. It is as if I am standing beside the deep, dark, bottomless pit of hell.

Wonderful heavenly Father, you taught us through the third psalm that, when we feel the threat of wickedness, it is to you we should flee for refuge. “Arise, O Lord! Deliver us, O our God!” So you taught us there to pray. But here in the fourth psalm you teach us patience, for your deliverance comes in your own good time.

We should want to know God more than we want to know his will for our lives.

It could have turned out badly. Back in spring 2010 I decided sight unseen to assign Fred Sanders’s The Deep Things of God as a textbook in my fall Theology I class. The publisher said that the book should be available by mid-August. That’s about one week before the start of the semester. What if there were delays? And regardless of delays, what if the book showed up and was lousy? What would I tell my students?

Recently, in the morning worship at our church, we used a lamentation written by former 51����/Talbot student, John Rinehart, to help us think about what it means to turn to the Lord in repentance. I include this today with the hope that God will continue to soften our hearts to the awesomeness of his holiness and the wonder of his love and grace. May the Lord turn our hearts to him more and more each day as we await the soon return of Jesus.

I loved my time in seminary. The seminary years were formative and growth-filled for me in many ways. I learned more about God in a concentrated period of time than ever before. My professors were scholar-pastors. I was blessed to be part of a healthy church. I made some of my best (and lifelong) friends during seminary. And God graciously started and grew our family during those years.

Last weekend Gene, my husband and I were up in Idyllwild at Hilltop, a renewal center God has given us and we were serving a church elder board. We knew that snow was predicted and we warned everyone to drive up early but Friday night four of the men came up late. At 11 pm, after it had snowed for a couple of hours, they were unable to get up the last hill. They struggled getting their chains on, and while working to get the chains on, left the front car door of their car open which was then mangled by a tree when the car slipped backwards. At that point they called to ask for help. Their souls and ours were anything but beautiful, they were full of turmoil and angst, but nothing prepared us for the change in our souls the next morning when we awoke. Two feet of fresh fallen snow and it was still coming down. We were able to see God in all of His magnificence as we opened our eyes to his beauty in the very thing that had caused us angst. A true picture of God in his gentle, silent, purity creating a picture of his workmanship in our souls. What a contrast to the night before.

O Heavenly Father, how typical of us it is to look, not first to you, but straight at our many foes, and then shrink back from our difficult situations and listen far too readily to those who question your goodness to us. Forgive us, Father! Our foes and troubles and doubts are not our final reality. Jesus Christ is our final reality!

“It really doesn’t matter whether I go to church. I have Christian friends, Bible classes, and chapels at 51����; why do I need a church?” I’ve heard some version of this statement at least three times during the past week. Although many 51���� students truly understand the importance of the local church and are actively involved in their churches, some of our students still don’t get it. They think that they already have plenty of access to good Bible teaching, fellowship, worship services, and opportunities to go on short-term missions trips. So what’s the big deal about the local church?

Lord Jesus Christ, almighty and risen from the dead, you are awesome! What is all the strength of this world compared to you? Who is there to challenge you? The greatest leaders from the most powerful nations of this globe, the very kings of this earth and every evil power they so often represent—what is the fiercest of this opposition next to your iron rule?

Edvard Munch's ultimate work was his expressionist series The Frieze of Life. In that series Munch sought to illustrate some of the most fundamental themes of the human experience: life, love, death, melancholy, and fear.

Have you ever put together a relational biography? A relational biography describes the special people that God has used in your life over the years to get you where you are today. Try it. You’ll be amazed to discover just how much you owe to the influence of others over the years. As it turns out, I owe them just about everything! What follows is a list of but a few of my creditors, past and present.

I need help praying. We all do. And our heavenly Father knows that. So he's placed his Spirit into our hearts and his word into our hands. The Good Book, and the Book of Psalms in particular, is the prayer book of God's people. It's part of how our Father helps us to pray. So I've tried writing prayers based on several of the psalms. In my church history classes, we begin class by reading a psalm and then praying—actually praying!—one of these prayers.

In the current spiritual formation culture it is easy to equate our spirituality with undertaking spiritual disciplines. There is a temptation to think of spiritual formation as the result of a formula—that if I just do certain activities, I’ll be mature. Frustration can set in, however, when we don’t see any immediate change. What helps is remembering that our spiritual transformation is a life-long process and knowing that we are not left alone in this undertaking. Indeed, each of the members of the Trinity plays a part.

Last week I posted a piece in which I encouraged each of us to actually pray when we pray. Since then my thoughts about prayer have moved in another direction, particularly as it relates to the training of our children. I am becoming increasingly convinced that one of the most significant ways we convey spiritual truth to our children is through our prayers. I believe that when we pray with our children, our children learn about our relationship with the Lord and what we believe about God. Let’s look at three things we teach our children when they listen to us pray.

I recently spent an hour with a Talbot guy who is really ‘getting it.’ Not only is Peter a bright, disciplined student of the New Testament. He is also up-to-his-ears in local church ministry.

Third semester Greek is a challenging place to be for our seminary students. Many of these folks are doing well just to hang on to what they learned back in Greek 1-2. Learning intermediate grammar finds our students negotiating a sharp turn deep in the tunnel of language acquisition. The proverbial light at the end of this tunnel—where knowledge of Greek pays significant exegetical dividends—gets almost snuffed out for a season by Wallace’s thirty-some categories of the genitive case.