Joseph was not the father of Jesus, but then again, he was. Jesus was the true offspring of the heavenly Father, but even the Son of God needed a daddy.

In the vortex of uncertainty and upheaval, what’s the best thing we can do? Seize the ordinary.

The Old Testament often seems like a long lost family--and a rather weird family, at that. How can followers of the Messiah today live our heritage in the Torah, Prophets, and Writings? Here are three simple suggestions.

When talking about God’s ultimate destination for us, we’ve grown sloppy in our language, nearsighted in our gaze, and un-Easter in our hope. We act and speak as if dying and going to heaven is what the faith is all about. It is most emphatically not.

There’s a delicious freedom to wrongdoing. It taps a primal desire within us for rebellion. We feel liberated, unshackled by demands to be this way, do this, avoid that. We become masters of our own destiny.

This misunderstood story is not a moralistic tale about bald prophets and child-eating bears, designed to teach youths to honor their elders and preachers. Rather, it's a brief glimpse into the age-old war that began in a garden and ended at an empty tomb.

He is no sweet and sappy, romanticized and Disneyfied, cartoonish Christ. He is ferocious, free, untamed, and heaven-bent on not leaving the battlefield until the war is won and he makes his enemies a footstool for his feet.

Virtue, like all good things, can easily be weaponized. And not only can, but constantly is. Indeed, I would argue that, for churchgoing, rule-following, tradition-honoring, morality-applauding people, virtue often becomes the cancer that we deem a badge of honor.

Whoever you are, your Father loves you differently than he loves other people. You are more than a grain of sand in the vast desert called humanity.

The Spirit did not plant preachers in the pulpit to be pontificating moralists or political hacks or spiritualizing psychologists or motivational speakers.

Sometimes believers vigorously debate God, sometimes they nod a silent Amen. Together, their narratives paint a picture of a life of faith characterized by complexity and tension.

Jonathan saw in David a reflection of who he himself was. This recognition pulled him outside himself and bound him to another.