Did you miss the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus last night? You didn't! Not really, because the pair will still appear close together tonight. Look to the western sky after sunset. In this view from June 10th, see if you can spot Mercury near the horizon as well.
When “what I feel” becomes the final test of what is true, we get into trouble. Strong feelings can seem like certainty, but that doesn’t mean they match reality.
Inflated “self‑attunement” is just a fancy way of saying, “I trust my own inner sense so much that I don’t need to check it.” In everyday life, that looks like: “I just know I’m right,” even when there’s no real proof.
When we live that way, we stop letting anything outside us: facts, wise counsel, Scripture, the wider church, challenge or correct us. Instead of asking, “Is this really true?”, we ask, “Does this feel true to me?”
If everyone does that, we lose common ground. We’re left with lots of people who are very sure of themselves, but less and less able to live in the same reality together.
Many believers today have never heard the words Nicaea, Constantinople, or Chalcedon. They have inherited the faith those councils secured without knowing the fight that secured it. This is not a small loss. When the grammar of the faith is forgotten, the faith itself begins to drift, and what passes for spirituality starts to bear little resemblance to the apostolic witness.
Nicaea, in 325, settled whether Jesus is fully God. Arius had taught that the Son was the highest of creatures, exalted but made. The Church discerned that this could not stand. If the Son is not fully God, then God has not actually come near in Christ, and what we encounter in the gospel is not God reconciling the world to Himself but a creature acting on God’s behalf. The council confessed the Son as one in being with the Father, true God from true God. Without that confession, there is no salvation, because no creature can save.
Constantinople, in 381, secured the same confession for the Holy Spirit. A movement had arisen that wanted to keep the Spirit as a divine influence rather than a divine Person. The Church discerned that this too could not stand. The Spirit who indwells believers, who gives life, who searches the depths of God, must Himself be God, or else what dwells in us is something less than God and our regeneration is something less than divine life. The council confessed the Spirit as Lord and Giver of Life, worshiped and glorified together with the Father and the Son. The Trinitarian grammar that all subsequent Christian worship presupposes was secured here.
Chalcedon, in 451, turned to the question of who Jesus actually is in Himself. Some had so divided the divine and human in Christ that He became almost two persons. Others had so fused them that the human was swallowed up by the divine. The Church discerned a third path. The fathers confessed one Person, the eternal Son, subsisting in two natures, divine and human, united without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. This is the confession that protects the incarnation from collapsing in either direction. Without it, either the Son does not truly become one of us, or we do not truly meet God in the man Jesus.
These three councils are not museum pieces. They are the load-bearing walls of the house we live in. Every time a believer sings to Jesus as Lord, prays in the Spirit, or receives the Eucharist, these confessions are at work beneath the surface. When the Church loses contact with them, what fills the vacuum is not freedom but distortion. The contemporary Christian landscape is littered with the wreckage of movements that thought they could improvise the faith without the apostolic and patristic memory. They could not, and we cannot.
To recover these confessions is not to retreat into the past. It is to stand in the same stream as the apostles and the early Church, breathing the same air, confessing the same Lord. The Spirit who hovered over the deep also hovered over those councils, and what He secured then continues to hold us now.
In a world of noise, what we are listening to and what we are listening for matters more than we realize. The ear is formed by what it habitually receives, and the soul takes on the shape of its steadiest attention. If we feed ourselves a diet of outrage and spectacle, we should not be surprised when we lose the capacity to hear a still, small voice.
It's not just a phase 🌕
Artemis II astronauts captured these views of the Moon as the Orion spacecraft flew around the far side of the Moon on April 6, 2026.
In life there are those things we resist that are born not of rebellion, but of the sense of violation they present to our humanness. They diminish, degrade, and devalue us. If we fail to resist such, we not only dishonor the image of God in us, we give permission for others to do the same.
You do not need to be extraordinary. You need to be the ordinary inhabited by the extraordinary life of God. A word, a meal, or a cup of cold water has the capacity to bring the life of God to this world and delight His heart.
A good portion of Christendom today seems to serve their political beliefs. It seems the political system has become so important to us that we act and speak in ungodly ways to protect what we have labeled godly.
Our politics are not our Christ.
A discipline I’m trying to learn to practice:
Sort it out with the Lord before you speak it out in public.
If, after sorting it out, the compelling remains to speak it, speak it in its sorted form.
Sorted doesn’t mean fully understood or settled. It means filtered by Jesus.
To pretend we’ve had a complete meritocracy throughout American history is intellectually dishonest.
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To pretend that merit is totally illusory or irrelevant is foolish.
We can value merit while acknowledging that sometimes what we called merit was just social advantage.
It is hard—but good—to see the increasingly stark difference between those who use Christianity and those who simply follow Christ made clearer every day.
Choose this day which you will be—and therefore whom you will serve.
“I swore never to be silent wherever and whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” ~Elie Wiesel
We emphasize Christian ministry, numbers, gifting, and fame, easily confusing externals as a measure of success with God. We forget that holiness and integrity are the paths to God’s work.