The words of the LORD are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times. —Psalm 12 This week, Linn and I watched Shutter Island. The story revolves around a U.S. Marshal’s investigation into a creepy mental hospital for the criminally insane during the 1950s. One of the major tensions in the story is the simple question: Who can the main character trust? He is in a creepy place and has been lied to repeatedly. He is also beginning to wonder if everything is part of an elaborate government conspiracy. He ...

The ferocious parts of the Psalms serve as a reminder that there is in the world such a thing as wickedness and hatred of God. —C. S. Lewis In her recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy,” Lori Gottlieb laments the current parenting tendency to shield children from most or all negative experiences (note: the article is worth reading, but there is some crude language). We don’t want our children to suffer through the difficulty of low self-esteem or skinned knees, so we structure their lives to all but ...

I was talking to one of my former seminary professors a few weeks ago when I heard that spiritual formation is now vogue within many Evangelical circles. Being a man who prides himself on knowing and predicting trends, I was quite disheartened to hear that I missed this. But as my frail ego was being glued backed together, I was encouraged, because, depending on what one means by spiritual formation, the shift is a good one and worth pursuing. Dallas Willard writes, “Spiritual formation in the tradition of Jesus Christ is the process of ...

I was recently having lunch with a friend of mine who is, by his own admission, an atheist. He is a thoughtful guy and was asking me a lot of good questions. The most challenging and memorable question he asked was this: What is the church's unique contribution to the city? Now that’s a good question. I thought about it for a while, and shaped my answer around the notion that the church should be a living demonstration of the gospel. In other words, when you come into contact with a Christian congregation, you should get a very real ...

As John mentioned in an earlier post, it is our summer practice at Grace Seattle to learn how to pray by looking at the Psalms. This Sunday, we will begin by learning how to pray our humanity as demonstrated in Psalm 9. David, like us, lived in a world filled with personal and global evil. Experiencing evil is often debilitating and it is all we can do just to survive. We can’t escape it. It is all around, pressing down on our hearts and our minds. Nonetheless, we are taught to pray against evil, however difficult or draining. David ends ...

During the summer, our congregation takes time to focus our attention on the Psalms. We emphasize one Psalm per week. We started this practice last summer and worked through Psalms 1 through 8. This summer, we are picking up right where we left off with Psalm 9. Why do we do this? When we were young, our parents taught us certain patterns of speech. Our mothers and fathers would teach us to say “Please,” “Thank You,” and “I’m sorry.” They knew the life-long importance of becoming skilled in these language forms and heart dispositions. ...