Blogs

Blogs

Our blogs offer thoughtful content from a variety of writers that will help you live with simple focus on Christ and His kingdom. This feed will give you all our newest content from all our blogs. These posts, we hope, will help to separate our thinking from the surrounding worldliness of our culture, and live deliberately at home, in the church, and in the world!

Links to each of our blogs may be found in the left sidebar. You may also browse all our blogs by topic by clicking the link in the right sidebar.

Letting Me Handle the Reins

By in Highlands Blog on

It is interesting how just a little taste of something can awaken an appetite that you didn’t know you had. And obviously, that taste doesn’t have to be food. It can be an experience, a relationship, a word of encouragement, or an opportunity to use a latent gift. In 1990, I was a recently married salesman for an industrial gas company. We had just begun attending Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which was pastored at the time by Frank Barker, one of the finest, most humble and effective pastors I have ever known. Frank led a men’s Bible study. . .
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Filed under Preaching, Work

Beachhead

By in Highlands Blog on

I noticed a young woman reading her Bible at the Panera where I was studying. After getting my coffee refilled, I stopped by her table and told her how it encouraging it was, especially these days, to see someone privately reading the Word of God in a public place. She smiled, said “Thanks” and then gave me a wave later when she left. I see this godly activity a lot in places where coffee is served and people meet.That anonymous young lady represents everything gospel going on in our country. Hope is alive, tastefully dressed, and drinking a vanilla latte.. . .
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Filed under Culture

Transformed by Ink and Paper

By in Highlands Blog on

Recently I had the occasion to evaluate every book I own. Because our church moved offices, I packed up my entire library and relocated it to our new place. The process of efficiently packing books is a challenge for me. I find it impossible to simply shove them in boxes without flipping through the pages, glancing at my marginalia and underlines. When I glance across the titles on my shelves I see a timeline of my theological journey. Several volumes stand out to me as having been particularly influential at key points in my life. When I think back to. . .
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Filed under Education

And There Shall be No More Death

By in Highlands Blog on

Dear _______, I just heard about your boy’s death and I mourn deeply with you and your family. I’ve prayed often that I would outlive my children as the prospect of living without any one of them seems too hard. On reflection, it’s quite possible, in God’s perfect plan, that even as your boy lives eternally with his Savior, his early death means that he’ll live in your hearts in a more powerful way than he would have otherwise. Not a day will pass when you don’t reflect upon him, his smile, his character, his laugh. Perhaps accompanied by a. . .
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Filed under Suffering & Grief

Friends

By in Highlands Blog on

When determining how wealthy we are in friends, there is only one question that must be asked? What is a friend? The Bible gives us some direction here: A friend is wise, reliable, willing to rebuke us, loves us at all times and is closer than a brother. Presumably, a friend is also someone we like, someone we have things in common with and someone around whom we can be ourselves. On Facebook, some of us have thousands of “friends,” other sad folks have only a few hundred. Imagine if you truly had a thousand friends who were “closer than. . .
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Competing Storylines

By in Highlands Blog on

Jingle Bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg. The Batmobile lost a wheel, and the Joker got away. These childish lyrics start innocently enough with a recognition of the season. Bells are prevalent and wonderful, they ring from church towers, they are played by choirs, they are a significant part of the festive decor adorning doorways and trees. But then, without warning, and surely for its iconoclastic shock-value, bell gives way to smell. The Caped Crusader is said to be malodorous! This is surely an adolescent attack on all that is True, Good, and Beautiful. The listener recoils realizing that. . .
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Filed under Uncategorized

The Faith of our Fathers

By in Highlands Blog on

The American political landscape is divided into two principal camps. We have official names for them, Democrat and Republican and nicknames like liberal and conservative or wackos and Nazis. It can mostly be boiled down to two opposing and fundamental opinions, either we believe our fathers had it right or we believe they had it wrong. Where we fall on the political spectrum is how strongly we feel about the job they did. “Our fathers were mostly right” makes you a conservative. “They never erred” makes you a right-wing nut job. It’s the same for the left side. If nothing. . .
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Filed under Church, Politics

Possessed

By in Highlands Blog on

Possessed. Now that is a selective word. We reserve such an evaluation when we want to describe unnatural or bizarre behavior. “They acted like they were possessed,” is what we say when reporting. “They were scary” or even, “They acted crazy” fails to convey our experience. And yet every person is possessed by some drive or emotion or desire everyday. We are all living under the influence of someone or something. That is why we dress the way we do and talk the way we do, to name just two everyday habits. You say, “I don’t care.” I ask, then,. . .
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Selling Jesus

By in Highlands Blog on

We’ve all been there, either at the giving or receiving end of a sales pitch. Giving it, we’re convinced the prey will never buy and on the receiving end, we’re convinced that the hunter will never leave us alone. No one wants to be sold something they don’t want. And if perchance we purchase, we’ll forever somewhat resent that person who “convinced” us we needed that product or service. And yet we love to buy things. Put a soft red sweater on display on a long wooden table with rock music playing overhead and we’ll gladly pass you six crisp. . .
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Christian Chicken Culture

By in Highlands Blog on

It wasn’t a restaurant that was high on my list. First, there were none around me for many years and secondly, how excited can you get about a chicken sandwich? And then I got married and had kids and took trips and that’s when I really discovered Chick-fil-A. Stopping to eat with five little kids can be daunting enough for Dad to be tempted to tell everyone, “We’ll eat when we get to Grandma’s!” Even if that promised meal is 200 miles away. But my good wife and Georgian Lindsay knew about a place that wouldn’t be so horrible. So. . .
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Filed under Culture

How should we deal with high profile accusations of sexual misconduct?

By in Highlands Blog on

First, we must ask the question: “Is it true?” Unfortunately, the all-important truth is often impossible to determine. If the alleged crime happened long ago, and the accused man vehemently denies wrongdoing, we do not know the truth. We may have an opinion, but to claim to know the truth is to lie. We do know that the accusation has some political motivation. If it was only about justice, she had 40 years to bring it up (privately or publicly) and choosing an opportune political time shows some political motivation…at least a little. Now, the timing of an accusation does. . .
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Filed under Justice

Choose Life

By in Highlands Blog on

I was adopted at birth by Mike and DeEtte. God truly blessed me with a wonderful family and it’s a God story from start to finish, but that isn’t the story I am here to tell. This story is about a woman named “Maria,” my birth mother. She found herself in a miserable situation, she was pregnant, the father of the baby was married and was a friend of the family. She was terrified of what her family would do to her if they found out. So, she took her three-year-old son, got in her car and left. She lived. . .
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A Great Offense is a Good Defense

By in Highlands Blog on

  Do you understand the temptation of good things? As we walk through our Christian life, most of us agree that we are often tempted. As a “mom of many,” I struggle with the temptation to be angry and not patient and kind. I struggle with a temptation to be lazy in discipline, selfish, and critical. We agree that these sins are all wrong, bad for ourselves, our husband, and our children. But the greatest temptation I face day-in and day-out is the temptation to do good things. If I may point out a personal strength, I am a fairly. . .
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Is Our God Cruel?

By in Highlands Blog on

You may be like me and eager to see God’s hand in our daily lives. Knowing that there are no accidents in His kingdom, I give real gravity to things that others may not pay much heed to. But like a well-directed movie, nothing is happening on screen except what the Director wants us to see. And so we live our lives as best we can, pursuing good things like children, job opportunities, spouses, promotions, prizes, and the like. And if we’re paying close attention, there are lots of signals. If we’re pessimistic, we read them one way, if optimistic,. . .
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Creating Wealth

By in Highlands Blog on

Mike has nothing. He lives in a hole in the ground. He does have some strength, his mind, and his ambition. There is a piece of land near the hole he lives in with large trees on it. He strikes a deal with the landowner that if he’ll let Mike chop down one of his trees, Mike will carve a canoe out of it and give him half of the $10 he thinks he can sell it for. Mike goes to a hardware store and asks the owner to lend him a saw and hatchet for a few days in. . .
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Filed under Uncategorized

Culture Wars

By in Highlands Blog on

When it comes to wars, the best ones are the ones where one side doesn’t know they are even in a conflict. That makes it quite easy for the aggressor to win, quickly and handily. Such wars are being fought for our very souls at the moment but we aren’t even aware of it. It’s the whole frog in the kettle thing all over again. The water is getting warming and we’re about to be burned but we’ve been mostly comfortable so no alarms are going off. The tension between the impulse to retreat totally and the dangers of being. . .
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Filed under Culture

God’s Ecosystem

By in Highlands Blog on

I was writing to a friend recently encouraging her in her distress by stating that the Church needs the needy like the oil that lubricates the machine. Without someone to serve the Church dries up. She would rather not be at the mercy of others’ largesse at this point in her life but that’s where God has her. It’s humbling to be the one the Good Samaritan has to rescue. But she is as vital to the work of the Church in her situation as those who are stepping in to meet her needs. My children are really interested in. . .
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