This past Sunday, I was preaching from the Gospel of Mark about Jesus' mother and brothers coming to retrieve Him and bring Him home ( Mark 3:31-35 ). I was struck by two things. First, the response of the crowd seemed to indicate, understandably, that Jesus' family had some more influence with Him than the rest of them did. The fact that they told Jesus His mother and brothers were present seems to indicate that they thought Jesus would stop what He was doing and at least see what they...

Happy New Year. I'd be willing to guess that many of us have started out this year with some sort of resolution to improve ourselves in one area or another. Maybe we are resolving to stop doing something bad, or we are resolving to begin doing something good. One of the things on my list this year is to  complete a daily Bible reading plan that has me in a different genre each day. I'm hoping that this will keep me from getting bogged down in the Pentateuch. Many a Bible-reading plan dies in...

For the past six years, our church has hosted a Christmas Eve candlelight service. This tradition actually goes back to when I was deployed to Qatar in 2019. The Christmas Eve service I conducted there, I brought to our church when I returned. The service is simple: the reading of the Christmas story of Luke and Matthew interspersed with the singing of carols and a devotional at the end based on one of the carols.     We have added one thing to this that is different from what I conducted in...