You’re sitting at Starbucks with an old friend from high school. A cup of steaming brew is warming your hands. You look across the table at your friend. Life has not been kind to her. Some bad decisions. Some hurtful betrayals. Some painful circumstances. She hasn’t known how to live. She hasn’t known who she [...]

I have been attempting to lay a foundation—a trustable foundation—for discerning the gospel, the whole gospel, and nothing but the gospel. That foundation begins with the assertion that there is a “core” to Scripture, to the story of God and his Creation, to the ministries of Jesus and his earliest disciples. This core—with prayerful and [...]

[This essay is a continuation of the preceding.] We are searching for the gospel. In order to do so, we need some criteria by which to determine what is gospel and what is not. I’m suggesting ten principles for finding gospel gold. In my prior essay, I suggested the following five ideas to help us [...]

If you go panning for gold, you need to know what to look for. Not everything you scoop up in your pan is the “good stuff.” Not even all that glitters is actually gold. You must do some careful sifting, some close examining, to find the treasure. Knowing how to tell the difference between what [...]

Jesus proclaimed something he called “the good news of the Kingdom of God.” So did the Apostles and the earliest disciples. When standing up to preach in synagogue or agora or (even) prison, the people we meet in the pages of the New Testament could reach into their pockets and pull out a sermon that [...]

Is there a nucleus to the Bible? A core? A vital center and heart? Is there any way to summarize the biblical story, to narrow its teachings down to the essentials, to get at the pith and point of Scripture? And—in particular—is there a short and succinct way to talk about the story that saves [...]

Everyone has a story to tell … a story about where they come from and what they do and who they love and why they are the way they are … a story about places and people, experiences and events, the stuff that has shaped us, the ideas that define and explain us. These stories [...]