The Village Blog

Everyone has a past. Some have logged spectacular moral failures, while others have managed to confine sins to less horrifying categories. The longer we know Christ, the more we come to realize that all sin is spectacular when measured against the plumb line of God’s holiness. All sin is a spectacular exercise in self-focus and self-worship.

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A few years back I had a front-row seat to an explosive, scandalous, public moral failure in the church. My dear friend had been asked to attempt to head off the catastrophe through counseling the people involved. Despite her wise words, they ran headlong into disaster, leaving an absolute mess for themselves and others to try to clean up. My friend was exhausted and grieved. Wanting to ...

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Thou preparest a table before me...my cup runneth over. Psalm 23:5 Above the cook top in my kitchen, a sign hangs with a quote from Lord Byron. It reads: “much depends on dinner.” The sign started off as a joke – a little irony directed at the Martha Stewart mindset that anything less than the perfect pork roast might unhinge the cosmos – but as time passed, it became less a witticism ...

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What more can we do to guide our children toward godly contentment in a consumer culture? Squelch Stupid Comparisons. Around age 6, children become aware of the purchasing patterns of others. They begin to ask for things that their peers are wearing, playing with or bringing in their lunchboxes. The child asks: “Can I have light-up sneakers like so-and-so has?” The parent hears: “Don’t ...

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Whether we like it or not, our children are consumers. Parents may be slow to recognize this truth, but marketers certainly are not. The hotbed of spending potential created by suburban affluence places your child in the crosshairs. Without the maturity to filter marketing messages, children take their claims as fact.

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We moved to the suburbs, like most young families, because they were affordably safe. No danger of gang violence, drive-by shootings or (gasp) low standardized test scores at neighborhood schools. Not even the danger that our neighbor might paint his trim blue or park his F-150 on the front yard. Affordable safety – what could be better?

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In Matthew 6:2-4 Jesus describes a type of giving that is known only to the Father, a giving so unselfconscious that our left hand does not know what our right hand is doing. The idea of giving unconsciously, without keeping a record and expecting the praise of others, is lofty and appealing, but it can be hard to actually live out. All gift-giving requires creativity and even more so does the ...

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In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructs His disciples to be people of their word. He teaches that our “yes” and “no” should be words of integrity. He instructs us to do what we say we will do so that our words carry unquestionable credibility. This is a foundational concept for Christian parents. We want our children to trust our words. Cultivating that trust begins at an early age ...

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