Earlier in the week, eager to be encouraged, I put this question out to Twitter: What has the Lord been teaching you from his Word recently? The responses were quick, plentiful, and encouraging. Here are a few of them. (Click here to read them all.) I’ve been meditating on the Good Samaritan, and I’m learning that loving our enemies isn’t merely the same as not “repaying evil for evil”, it means returning love for evil. It’s been quite convicting. — …

It’s the age of the expert, the age of the specialist. And sure enough, there’s a growing theme in the Christian world that experience is a necessary prerequisite to authority. If you want to know about parenting, you need to talk to a parent. If you want to know about marriage, you need to talk to someone who has been married. If you want to know how to suffer well, you speak to someone who has suffered. This theme is …

We Christians spend a lot of time reading the Bible, hearing it preached, and meditating on its words. Why this commitment? We are committed to the Bible because of what it is and what it does. The Bible guides us to its purpose and power through the many metaphors it uses to describe itself. Here is a pretty good collection of them. Perhaps you’d do well to meditate on a few of them. The Bible is a lamp that illumines. …

They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, that you can’t appreciate what you have until it’s taken away. Isn’t this why we sometimes imagine ourselves without the people we love? As we imagine their absence we grow in our affection. Perhaps we would grow in our affection for the Bible if we imagined it being taken away. When I was in Hawaii I was able to sit through a couple of classes on the history and …