by Barbara Haesecke

One Sunday our pastor challenged us to “be willing to move toward the messy” to become the kind of people Jesus wants us to be. I immediately thought of Tamar. Her Genesis  38 story is tucked away in the middle of Joseph’s compelling tale, and many routinely skip over her to continue his amazing technicolor dreamcoat saga. But more than an interruption, her story teaches us valuable lessons even though it competes for the messiest story in the Bible. She’s the woman who dressed up as a prostitute and seduced her father-in-law just so she could have a baby.  But is that all there is to her story?  The more I’ve studied her, the more I realize she doesn’t deserve our typical harsh labels and quick judgments. I’m convinced that God doesn’t wants us to leave her out.  Her courageous and determined fight for justice needs to be told so that we can follow her example today.

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By Brad Hambrick

Most Christians are familiar with the story of Joseph as a powerful example of forgiveness and restoration. It is that. But it is not a simple, flat story. It is a complex story that spans a lifetime. It involves family drama, multiple betrayals, and political theatre. It is not a story we can apply as simply as Aesop’s fable The Fox and The Grapes. The story of Joseph is no simple children’s story.
Maybe one of the most dangerous misapplications in the story of Joseph occurs when it’s cart-blanche applied to how an abuse victim should respond to their abuser; as if it is a simple one-to-one application. That is the focus of this article. What needs to be understood in order to apply Joseph’s story wisely to cases of abuse? We need to begin by tracing the theme of power throughout the story.

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by Samuel Amadi 

Moses gives Joseph more time in Genesis than he does any other character—a striking fact given the significance of Genesis’s other main characters: Adam, Noah, and the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This prominence is even more striking considering the apparent insignificance of Joseph in the rest of Scripture.
What then do we make of the Joseph story? Why is it so prominent in Genesis?
Many Christians fail to notice how Joseph’s story contributes to the Genesis narrative and to redemptive history in general.

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By Ed Welch  

A seventy-five-year-old man wanted to talk about his past, especially his childhood and early teen years, because his past felt so present. Like many of us, he wanted to be less controlled by his past and jettison its haunting episodes.

Scripture does help us with our painful pasts, but it does more than that. It tells us to forget things we want to remember, and remember things we are likely to forget. 

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By Tony Merida

In our gospel-centered movement, we should emphasize Paul’s pattern of preaching the grace of Christ. But we should also highlight his deep commitment to friendship.

Paul’s constant interaction with his friends was a sign of maturity, not deficiency. Even the mighty apostle needed friends—and he needed them for the same reasons you do.

Click here to read three simple but glorious benefits of friendship...

By Jennifer Phillips

Brian and I recently led a parenting workshop at our church. I’d like to think we were asked to teach this course because our mad parenting skillz are off the chart, but it may have more to do with the fact that we’re the only ones who said yes. Also, we’re one of the only couples in our church whose kids are over the age of five, so there’s that. BUT ANYWAY. I digress.
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We were given the freedom to choose from any parenting-related topic, and while it may have been easier to zero in on things like “Surviving on Little-to-No Sleep,” “How to Get Your Kids to Behave in Public,” or “How to Potty Train and Not Lose Your Mind,” we knew we wanted to zero in on the heart—and not so much our children’s hearts, but what parenting reveals about our hearts. We wanted to talk about idolatry.

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The bailing trend is an understandable byproduct of a busy culture.  But is it Christian?   
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My friend lives in Toronto’s hipster west end, I on the eastern edge of buttoned-up midtown. To see each other, especially when both of us are swamped with work and family commitments, we flex the muscle of careful planning and muster herculean effort. However, several weeks ago, we planned to meet rather spontaneously for coffee on a Monday. She would be in my neck of the woods.

For a fleeting moment, our friendship had the gratuitous gleam of convenience.

Then she moved our meeting spot 15 minutes further from my house.  The gleam faded, and I bailed.  "Today has run away from me," I texted the day before, "and I don't think I have time tomorrow for coffee. I'm sorry, because I'd love to see you.  

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If you are like me, you probably find yourself more consistently confused or failing in prayer than in any other area in the Christian life. Why is that? Talking to the God who chose us, saved us, and sustains us should be the most natural and delightful thing in the world, shouldn’t it? Perhaps it should, but more often than not, it isn’t.
We all know we should pray more. The guilt within reminds us. But if we are honest, we neither want to pray more, nor are we really convinced we need to. Why? Perhaps we don’t really understand what prayer is — or we’re prone to forget.

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How to ensure 'personal sustainability.' 

​In recent years, a number of Christian leaders have rightly called lethargic and half-hearted Christians to quicken their pace, to dedicate more of their time, talents, money and efforts to serving the Lord in the local church and in evangelistic outreach at home and abroad.  I welcome this “radical,” “don’t waste your life” message to up the pace, and I rejoice in its positive impact on thousands of Christians. Some of us, though, need to hear a different message: 

“Slow your pace or you’ll never finish the race.”

As Brady Boyd warns in Addicted to Busy, “Ultimately, every problem I see in every person I know is a problem of moving too fast for too long in too many aspects of life.”  I’m not proposing that we put our feet up and opt out of life and Christian service. No, I’m talking about being sensitive to changes in ourselves and our circumstances and re-calibrating our pace to ensure personal sustainability.

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"If this were 1999—the year that I was converted and walked away from the woman and lesbian community I loved—instead of 2016, Jen Hatmaker's words about the holiness of LGBT relationships would have flooded into my world like a balm of Gilead. How amazing it would have been to have someone as radiant, knowledgeable, humble, kind, and funny as Jen saying out loud what my heart was shouting: Yes, I can have Jesus and my girlfriend. Yes, I can flourish both in my tenured academic discipline (queer theory and English literature and culture) and in my church. My emotional vertigo could find normal once again.

Maybe I wouldn’t need to lose everything to have Jesus. Maybe the gospel wouldn’t ruin me while I waited, waited, waited for the Lord to build me back up after he convicted me of my sin, and I suffered the consequences. Maybe it would go differently for me than it did for Paul, Daniel, David, and Jeremiah. Maybe Jesus could save me without afflicting me. Maybe the Lord would give to me respectable crosses (Matt 16:24). Manageable thorns (2 Cor 12:7)."
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