Do you have a well-stocked spiritual pantry? If not, how do we stock our hearts to prepare for the upcoming storms? Here’s the advice of a woman much wiser than me and the story through which she taught me.

With the gospel as our backdrop, we need to engage discernment as whole people. God created us with minds, souls, and bodies. When we only engage one of these, our discernment is lacking. It’s weakened because we’re only engaging part of us, rather than our entire selves.

Growing up, I always craved the intimate relationship I saw that others had with God. But it seemed like this intimate relationship was always out of reach. What I didn’t realize is that in Christ, God has provided the way for me to have an intimate relationship with him—one of speaking and listening, of learning and growing in love.

Do you wonder why God never speaks to you? Pastors, conference speakers, mentors, and friends all hear from God. But all you hear is the humming of your dishwasher. You never feel any nudges or hear any whispers. Maybe you’re starting to wonder if God loves you less.

A book review of Zach Keele’s book, The Unfolding Word. The Unfolding Word seeks to help us see how the entire Bible unfolds as one unified story held together by the gospel.

Church can feel like an add-on to our weeks. We’ve already invested so much time in going to small groups and other activities. Is church even important? We have the music, the teaching, the Word, and the fellowship all contained in our pockets. Is it really worth waking everyone up early and piling into the car to drive to church each Sunday to do what we’ve already been doing all week?

False teaching should make us mad. It should make us indignant for God’s glory and the souls of the lost. But does it ever cause us to mourn? If we felt this kind of grief, how would that change our words and actions towards false teachers? Perhaps we’d be better proclaimers of the truth they need.

Rich theology with it’s complex history has been abridged to memes, social media captions, and slogans. What was once discussed and believed from thorough exegesis and study can be summed up in pithy sentences on graphics. What took some years of study, question-asking, and many books from a variety of libraries to understand, others today can learn in thirty minutes listening to a podcast or two minutes scanning an article. While there are good things to be taken from these, I wonder if we’ve forsaken anything for them.

False teachers are everywhere. How do we grow in discernment to know truth from error? First we must lay a foundation. Here’s how.

Discernment is like examining a well-done counterfeit painting—we need an expert, well-trained eye to see the tiny detail differences between the genuine and the fake. But how is this eye for detail trained? How do we strengthen our discernment muscles?

When we think of ways to grow in our love for God and our neighbours, we often think of public or visible acts of service in which we give our time and resources: volunteering in church, donating money and clothes, babysitting for a tired mom, cooking a meal for a mourning family, and the like. But have we ever considered that loving God and loving our neighbours well means that we must know God’s Word well?