This was a message with good content and good storytelling (David, Abigail, Nabal from I Samuel 25) and a good title, but ultimately in search of a bottom line. I started out with It's not your fault, but it is your chance.  Then I moved to God adds his intervention...

We get knocked down. We get up again. You’re never gonna keep us down. Or so we hope. We’ve all been there – knocked down and presumably out for the count.  For a lot of us the wounds are self-inflicted.  For others, we’re victims. But when we’re down in spirit, in...

Before I ever had a blog, before Abingdon Press ever started turning sermons into books, before even seminary ... there was The Trentonian. Huh? Between 1985 and 1987, I was the tennis correspondent for The Trentonian, a tabloid-style daily serving Trenton, NJ and its...

Here's a great shot taken as I was beginning my sermon this past Sunday at the Zoar Road Campus of Good Shepherd:   We're one church in two locations.  Yet the mission, strategy, and values are identical at both locations and in both Spanish & English. So we...

I had another Top Five Tuesday planned. But then Monday happened and Tom Petty died. So here's a reprise of a post from 2011:  my Top Five Tom Petty Songs.   I admit that early on Tom Petty took some getting used to. First, there’s the voice. Unique. Sometimes he...

You could have called it Switcheroo Sunday. Yesterday, we became one church on two campuses with THREE preachers. I preached live at our Zoar Road Campus (normally a video venue) while Chris Thayer preached live on our Moss Road Campus and Sammy Gonzalez held it...

You knew we'd get here, didn't you? We've fallen apart, fallen alone, and even fallen hard, so it makes sense we'd take a look at what it means to fall well. To do so, we're changing Testaments, changing strategies, and even changing perspectives. I think it's going...

Last night concluded a three-night Revival Series at the Morris Chapel United Methodist Church in Walkertown, NC, a bucolic town on the outskirts of Winston-Salem. I preached a two-night revival there in 2016 and was grateful for the return invitation and expanded...

A lot of you have asked how it is that I give messages on Sunday mornings without using any notes. Actually, it's not just Sundays ... this week I've been preaching a revival up in Kernersville and those, too, I give without notes. Getting up and giving a message...

I went to Princeton for college. There.  I said it.  I don't ever preach it out of fear that people will think "he's a snob," or "he's an elitist," or "he is an egghead" and I'll lose whatever common ground I had developed with them. For those and other reasons, I...