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“The Christian life was never meant to be a self-improvement project. When effort replaces grace, formation turns into exhaustion and shame. The deeper question isn’t whether we’re trying hard enough, but what we’re being formed by—and whether we’ve arranged our lives to receive the life of Christ.”
You don’t want to leave.
Everything in you wants to stay — with your Father.
But learning how to return, and what you carry with you when you do, may be the heart of prayer itself.
Prayer does not end at the throne. It continues into the Family Quarters — the intimate rooms where the King is not only Sovereign, but Dad. In Part 2 of The Bridge of Prayer, we follow the soul beyond awe into belonging. Here, memories awaken, wounds are tended, callings are affirmed, and love becomes the atmosphere you breathe. This is the place where your identity is restored, your fears quiet, and your soul remembers what home feels like.
Prayer is not merely a practice, a discipline, or a quiet corner of the day. It is a place—vast, holy, and more real than the world beneath our feet. Scripture hints that when we pray, we cross a threshold into the presence of the King, stepping onto a bridge that feels less like a walkway and more like a cathedral carved from glory. In this first part of The Bridge of Prayer, we follow that ascent: through gates flung open wide, past ministers who serve with radiant joy, and toward a throne room where awe and intimacy collide. Here, every lie trembles, every longing awakens, and your soul recognizes the truth it was made for. Prayer is not escape. It is homecoming. And at the end of the long walk into glory, one breathtaking reality remains: the King you came to meet… is your Dad.
Solitude and silence feel both beautiful and dangerous. Yet these are the places where God reshapes us. This post invites you onto the bridge where the world grows quiet and the whisper of God becomes clear.
But our interaction with Scripture is something different: it is symbiosis rather than mastery, formational rather than transactional, musical rather than mathematical.
From the garden of Eden to the upper room in Jerusalem, God has been building bridges to reach us. The story of Scripture is not one of permanent separation but of a Father who refuses to leave His children stranded on the far side of a raging river.
Let’s talk about the practical ways God has ordained for us to grow in character and become more like Jesus from the inside out. In the next couple of blog posts, I’ll be breaking down each aspect of what I outline here. It seems to me that God has ordained three big...
When I read that verse, that very clear voice in my head said, “Write your book to me as an act of worship and leave it in my hands.”
In that moment, God did for me what he so often does. He flipped the equation of my CBA on its head and exposed me in the process.
If there is one thing that has come home to me since I retired, it’s the truth of the old adage:
“Wherever you go, there you are”.
And in that choice, Jesus enabled the great reversal. We, armed with our misguided power, fear, jealousy, religious fervor, ruthless expedience, dehumanization of others and justifying ourselves for the rightness of our violence killed the God who came to save us. It was the worst thing we could have done.
And it was the very thing God used to redeem us.
It seems to me it would take a great deal more faith to believe that it was possible for someone to write, with exacting detail, how his famous offspring would be executed a thousand years before it happened by chance than it would to take this as another piece of evidence that Jesus was who he said he was.
Think of it this way. It is possible to study hard and become an expert on the right technique for doing every meaningful exercise with free weights. But if you never pick up a free-weight and actually do the exercises all of your knowledge will be of no benefit to your muscles or health at all.
So what do you think might happen if you spend the 40 days of Lent this year expectantly praying these two verses every day? You would be asking God every day to help you know your heart and your anxious thoughts better and to help lead you out of any way you might be offending Him and into the way everlasting.
The point of grace is to give us imperfect people a foundation of love and acceptance that will enable us to grow into the people God intended us to be.
I believe it is of the utmost importance on this journey of faith to set realistic expectations. Expectations can be an incredibly powerful force. If your expectations for what the life of a Christian should look like are out of touch with the reality of what...
Matthew 16:13-23 “When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is? They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” “But what about...
In many cases, the church in the West has circumvented the process and procedures because we believe we know how to form ourselves better than God does. We go all-in on shortcuts that make it easier on us and in so doing greatly undermine the quality of the product produced.
That’s when the old familiar anxiety I haven’t felt in years rose up in me.
Almost involuntarily the cry of my heart came, picking up momentum as it tumbled out of my head.
“Pick me, Jesus. Please, please, please pick me. Not out of pity and please don’t just settle for me. Pick me because You want me on Your team, not because You’re so nice You have to take me.”
I found myself shocked and frightened, because I realized we live in a world where a soundbite from a bad sermon in the random town of Malden, Missouri (Population: 4,277 – 3 hours south of St Louis), can become FRONT PAGE NATIONAL NEWS. . .I’m concerned, because we seem to live in a culture where we have an overabundance of religiously and politically motivated rock-bearing Pharisees and a critical shortage of extravagant grace.