For hours our group of foreign and Chinese teachers drove south through rice paddies and terraced tea hills to the famed Yellow Mountains of east central China. My initial fascination worn thin through endless unfamiliarity, I felt I had been dropped on another planet and wished I could switch off my senses. But we kept driving and entered the town of Mt. Jihua (pronounced...

The gospel does two things for us when we suffer: it comforts us, and it calls us. In my last post, I surveyed the glorious hope our identity in Christ gives us in the face of suffering:...

The suffering in our lives keeps us from doing and experiencing many good things, and it often teaches us bad things. Suffering has the tendency to pervert our perception of the world around us. Children who grow up abused often have uniquely distorted views of God, self, and others. Those who suffer traumatic experiences in any stage of life often have difficulty engaging...

In my last article, I described our core identity in terms of being God's image-bearers, but if you survey the New Testament, you'll find its overarching understanding of our identity in Christ is that we are sons, co-heirs, siblings of Christ destined to become like Christ. So, we must ask the question: is the New Testament replacing the Old Testament image-bearer motif w...

Identity is who you are. It tells you what you are worth, why you are here, and how you should live. It provides roles and boundaries for your relationships; it provides goals and parameters for your lifestyle; it gives significance to your thoughts, desires, and behavior. Identity is something that can and should be ascribed to each of us by God alone, and the identity He...