Are you satisfied yet? When I look around my home, my office, my schedule, my life, I see evidence everywhere that I am not. My fridge is full. So are my cabinets. My closet has items I haven’t worn in a year. I have stacks of books in my office—must-reads as well as a whole shelf marked “skim.” Too often, my calendar feels like I’m playing Tetris. Then there’s my phone: that dinging, buzzing...
Last week, we explored the surprising reality that although it seems like we have no control over the things preventing us from making the changes necessary to overcome our addictions, it’s actually more often the case that the crises themselves are a part of whatever addiction we’re wrestling. I remember a time early in my recovery from pornography addiction when I had promised to housesit for a...
Do you have a habit or addiction you’ve been trying unsuccessfully to break? If so, you might unwittingly be using chaos to keep yourself stuck. Anytime we’re working to grow, we’re going to face resistance. Change, even good change, can be scary. The flesh, or the “old man,” offers a way out: chaos. If life gets too chaotic—if crisis comes, if the bottom falls out, if I get slammed with...
If the devil walked up to you this morning with a contract in his hand and asked you to sign it, would you? I’m guessing you wouldn’t. You might not even read it. Even so, despite what you say, many of us actually do sign our names to binding agreements he writes for us all the time. The enemy is too cunning to come at you the way I’ve described above. Instead, he looks for opportunities to...
I wrote a blog for men recently in which I said men’s bodies were designed with a purpose: to love God and love others. I wrote because despite how natural and normal sexual temptations may feel, it’s essential that we (men and women alike) know that our bodies were designed for love, not for sexual sin. A few days later, I read a post by a friend of mine, Mark Stephenson, a pastor at Horizon...
I have a problem of using food to try to settle myself down at the end of a day. I’ve known this about myself for years but haven’t done much about it. In my life, it’s been one of those sins Paul writes to Timothy about, the kind that isn’t outwardly obvious on the face of my life, but that follows behind to judgment (see 1 Timothy 5:24). Recently, God spoke to me about this: “You don’t need two...