“Do you understand what I have done for you?” [Jesus] asked them. “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you should also wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do…
A few days before Christmas, my phone buzzed with a text message. “Ho, ho, ho,” it read. “Santa made a special delivery. Check your front porch. Ho, ho, ho. Merry Christmas!” I opened the front door and looked down at a sizable red-and-white gift bag with tissue paper billowing from its top. It contained a…
Several years ago, I served on our church prayer team. Every Sunday I had the privilege of praying for and alongside women for physical and emotional healing or about marriage restoration, job loss, family strife, prodigal sons and daughters, barrenness, and plain discouragement. One Sunday, an amazing thing happened. A woman came to the altar…
In Jesus’s parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14–30 ESV), a man going on a journey entrusts varying amounts of his talents—or money—to each of three servants. These servants are δουλος (doulos), bond servants. Spiros Zodhiates’s Word Study Dictionary of the New Testament says a δουλος is “a slave, one who is in a permanent relation of…
Christ himself was like God in everything. But he did not think that being equal with God was something to be used for his own benefit. But he gave up his place with God and made himself nothing. He was born as a man and became like a servant. (Philippians 2:6–7 NCV) Every September when…
I have a bunch of kids—four, with a fifth on the way. Their ages currently range from three to ten years, but soon there will be a newborn in the mix. So I’ve had kiddos in the birth to kinder classes at church for a long time. Through those years, I have also served in…