Calling oneself a “Bible-believing Christian” fails to account for the fact that every belief system, knowingly or unknowingly, arises out of a particular history.
From the very beginning, the community that God was forming was going to be much more inclusive than anyone could have imagined.
There are important historical reasons for making a distinction between ministry and vocation.

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“The fear of the Lord” is our heart’s awakening to and recognition of God’s outrageous goodness.
It's one thing to hope for a new reality; it's quite another to stand before it, no matter how wonderful.
Three Lenten songs express the same astonishing wonder of a Lord who willingly suffers and dies.
News of Kilmer's death hit me like a freight train because his Doc Holliday stirred something in me about friendship—both the earthly kind and the divine.
Sometimes the old story is the one we need to hear again and again.
The great lie of addiction is that suffering must be fled, must be numbed, must be drowned out by any means necessary.
To be happy is to be the object of God’s love in Christ and to love God and others with the love of Christ.
You cannot sever the saint from the sinner. Christians remain both simultaneously.
God is a judge, but unlike you, God is just!
In grace, God chooses to love his people.
This is an excerpt from Ditching the Checklist: Assurance of Salvation for Evangelicals (and Other Sinners) by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2025), pgs. 5-7.
The wrong god means love remains frail, fickle, or a fiction. The right God means love is the most reliable thing in all the world.