Branches of Christ

  Sheep Among Wolves: The Radical Partnership God Is Offering You There is a restaurant in Japan where every single member of the waitstaff struggles with memory loss. Every order taken, every dish delivered, every interaction carries the possibility of error. About 37 percent of the time, something goes wrong. And yet, customers leave feeling better than when they walked in. The laughter, the warmth, the sense that every person in that room still has something to offer, something that matters, makes the whole experience more meaningful than a flawless meal at a five-star establishment. It is a picture worth sitting with for a moment. Because it raises a question that cuts right to the heart of how many of us think about God, about faith, and about our own role in the kingdom of heaven. Do we believe that God can actually use us, with all of our failures, our forgetfulness, our inconsistencies, and our very human limitations? The answer, if we take Jesus at his word, is an empha...

  Don't Be Afraid: Learning to Trust God When the Flour Runs Low There is a moment most of us know well. You open the pantry and the shelves are nearly bare. You check the account and the balance is almost gone. You look at the situation in front of you and the math simply does not work. In those moments, fear has a way of wrapping itself around the chest like a vice, and the future feels like a door that is closing fast. The ancient story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, found in 1 Kings 17, speaks directly into that moment. It is not a fairy tale. It is a record of real people, real hunger, and a real God who operates in ways that routinely defy human logic. The Book You Are Writing Before getting to the widow and her flour jar, it is worth pausing on the king who sets the stage for this story. Ahab, described in 1 Kings 16:30, is remembered for doing more evil in the eyes of God than any king before him. Whatever else might be said about him, that is his legacy. That is...

  Letting Go of the Rope: Why the Tug of War Inside You Is Not a Surprise There is a battle happening inside most of us, and if we are honest, it has been going on for a long time. It is not the kind of battle that makes headlines or gets talked about over dinner. It is quieter than that, and in some ways more exhausting. It is the war between who we want to be and who we keep defaulting to. Between the life we sense God calling us toward and the comfortable, familiar patterns we cannot seem to shake. This is not a new struggle. It is as old as faith itself. And understanding it might be the first step toward finally finding some ground to stand on. The Hand That Keeps Pulling Out Picture a simple game. Two people stack their hands one on top of the other, and the person on the bottom keeps sliding their hand out and placing it on top. Over and over, back and forth. It sounds like a children's game, and it is. But it is also a surprisingly accurate picture of the spiritual lif...

  The Danger of Comfortable Evil: When Good Enough Is Not Godly There is a quiet danger that most of us never talk about in polite company. It is not the dramatic, headline-grabbing kind of evil that makes us recoil in horror. It is the slow, creeping kind — the kind that settles in so gradually that we stop noticing it is there at all. It becomes the water we swim in, the air we breathe, and eventually, the life we live without ever questioning whether God would recognize it as faithful. This is one of the most urgent spiritual challenges facing believers today. The Potter and the Clay In Jeremiah 18, God instructs the prophet to visit a potter's house. When Jeremiah arrives, he watches the craftsman work a lump of clay on a wheel. The clay becomes marred — misshapen, imperfect — and rather than discarding it, the potter simply remolds it into something new. God then speaks directly to the heart of the moment: he asks whether he cannot do the same with his people. Like clay in...

  The Harvest Is Plentiful: A Call to Stop Writing Your "Ought-To Biography" There is a book that most of us are quietly writing, though we would never put it on a shelf or hand it to a friend. It has no publisher, no deadline, and no end in sight. It is what one might call an "ought-to biography" — a running record of everything we felt called to do, sensed God nudging us toward, or knew deep in our conscience we should pursue, but never quite got around to doing. The chapters pile up. The pages fill with good intentions. And the harvest sits waiting in the field. The question worth sitting with today is this: what would it look like to put that book down and actually go to work? A Gut-Twisting Compassion In Matthew 9, Jesus moves through towns and villages, teaching, preaching, and healing. Then something stops him. He looks at the crowds and is moved with compassion — and the original Greek word here is not a gentle, polite feeling of sympathy. It is visceral...

When Playing It Safe Becomes Dangerous: The Call to Courageous Faith There is a quiet kind of danger that rarely gets talked about in conversations about good and evil. It does not wear a villain's face. It does not announce itself with loud proclamation. It simply sits still, says nothing, and lets the world burn while telling itself it is being kind. It is the danger of passive faith — of knowing the truth and choosing comfort over conviction. The ancient story of a priest named Jehoiada, recorded in 2 Chronicles 23, cuts to the heart of this issue with remarkable force. But to understand why his courage matters, you have to understand the darkness that surrounded him. A Legacy of Ruin The kingdom of Judah had been sliding in a troubling direction for some time. Despite the faithfulness of kings like Asa and Jehoshaphat — men who sought God with genuine hearts — the generations that followed made catastrophic choices. Jehoram, Jehoshaphat's son, walked in wickedness and died ...