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Enjoy the Gift, Worship the Giver

  Rethinking Pleasure in the Spiritual Life Many Christians quietly assume that pleasure and holiness are opposites. If something feels good, it must be suspect. If it’s enjoyable, maybe it’s worldly. But that isn’t the picture Scripture gives us. Pleasure is God’s idea. He placed taste in food, beauty in sunsets, laughter in friendship, rest in sleep, and joy in marriage. Paul reminds Timothy that everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if received with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:4). Solomon says that to eat, drink, and enjoy the fruit of our labor is a gift from the hand of God (Ecclesiastes 5:18-19). David goes further and says that at God’s right hand there are pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11). So let’s be clear from the start: not all pleasure is sin. The problem is not that pleasure exists. The problem is what pleasure can do to a distracted heart. A good gift can quietly pull our attention away from the Giver. Pleasure rarely announces itself as an en...
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Too Much: Are We Drowning?

Somewhere along the way, content stopped being something we went looking for and became something that chases us. News alerts, videos, newsletters, podcasts, devotionals, forwarded messages. Pick up your phone for ten seconds and something is already waiting for you. And now that AI can produce articles, images and videos in a few seconds, the pile is growing faster than ever. I create content myself, so I'm not pointing fingers from the outside. But I think it's time we asked an honest question: is all of this actually helping us? How much is out there? The numbers are hard to wrap your head around. One estimate says the world creates, captures, copies and consumes about   402 million terabytes of data every day , and that the yearly total is heading toward   221 zettabytes in 2026 , up from 181 in 2025. People send hundreds of billions of emails daily, and more than   720,000 hours of video   are uploaded to YouTube every single day. To be fair, a lot of that "data...
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Signal and Noise: Staying Tuned to the Voice That Matters

  What Is Signal and Noise? The terms come from engineering and communications. The   signal   is the information you actually want to receive. The   noise   is everything else that interferes with it: static on a radio, background chatter in a crowded room, a weak cell connection that garbles a phone call. What matters is the   signal-to-noise ratio . If the signal is strong and the noise is low, the message comes through clearly. If the noise rises, or the signal weakens, the message gets distorted or lost. Nothing is wrong with the broadcast itself. The problem is on the receiving end. We live in the noisiest period in human history. The average person is flooded daily with notifications, headlines, opinions, advertisements, and endless content. Most of it isn’t evil. Much of it is simply loud, urgent, and competing for the same attention God wants us to give to Him. Signal and Noise in the Spiritual Life In the spiritual life, the   signal   i...
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No Man Is Greater Than His Prayer Life

  A call back to the prayer closet Drawing on the writings and teachings of Leonard Ravenhill There is a question every pastor, every leader, and every believer must eventually face, and it is not comfortable:   do we actually believe God answers prayer, or have we simply learned to run the church without waiting on Him? We can build excellent programs. We can fill a calendar with events, grow attendance, sharpen our preaching, polish our worship, and still be spiritually dry. Activity is not the same as anointing. A church can be busy doing things   for   God while quietly ceasing to spend time   with   God — and no one notices until the power is gone and only the machinery remains. The poverty we don't talk about One old prayer warrior put it bluntly: "Poverty-stricken as the Church is today in many things, she is most stricken here, in the place of prayer." That line stings because it is still true. We are not lacking resources, technology, or talent. We...
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Psychomotor Agitation: What It Is, and Why the Church Needs to Understand It

Recently I came across this topic. Sharing it for wider awareness. Every pastor has seen it, even if we didn't have a name for it. The visitor who cannot sit still through the sermon, tapping a foot, wringing their hands, rising to pace the back of the sanctuary. The elderly saint in the pew who suddenly seems restless and irritable in a way that is out of character. The young adult in the prayer line who cannot stop moving, whose words come out fast and pressured, whose body seems to be racing even when their spirit longs for peace. Often we reach for spiritual categories first—anxiety of the heart, oppression, a need for deeper surrender. Sometimes that is exactly right. But sometimes what we are watching has a clinical name:   psychomotor agitation . Understanding it will make us better shepherds. What Is Psychomotor Agitation? Psychomotor agitation is a state of increased, purposeless physical movement that comes together with inner restlessness and emotional tension. It is not...
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