The notion of separating truth and love has perhaps been around for centuries but is a hot issue today since many believe “their own truth” is more important than objective truth. Some argue that truth is more important than love, while others argue that love is more important than truth. However, separating truth and love is a mistake that can have devastating consequences. As God is love and Jesus said “I am the Truth” it is important to understand the significance of not disconnecting truth and love.

First, when it comes to communication, truth and love go hand in hand. When truth is spoken without love it often hurts; when love is expressed without truth it seems hollow. Yet love and truth are two sides of the same coin. It is challenging but essential to have love and truth fully integrated.

Second, God is love. If one believes that God is love, it is important to integrate that love into every aspect of our lives, including...

Spiritual hunger is growing: how do we respond?

Barna Group has been doing research for about four decades. In a recent survey, they speak about the Rising Spiritual Openness in America. While relatively recent evangelical Christianity has created a tight formula for how to become a Christ-follower, Jesus was broad in his description of the “how to” while very clear on the fact that he is the “who to.” The apparent decline in people of faith in recent decades is reversing. Today there is frustration with cantankerous politics, social polarization, and the dissipating of civil discourse. At the same time, there is hope that the future can be different and a hunger for spiritual reality.

In case you think this is the old folks back home on a spiritual quest, the positive data skews toward younger generations. “Overwhelmingly, Christian teens today say that Jesus still matters to them; 76 percent say “Jesus speaks to me in a way that is relevant to...

Why “hear and obey” trumps “understand then do.”

We are privileged to live in a world where we can google anything, question everything and become knowledgeable on topics quickly. But can this data-at-our-fingertips lifestyle prevent us from truly experiencing fulfillment in life? Jesus said, “Whoever hears these teachings of mine and obeys them is like a wise man…” It sounds so simple, like a line from a children’s song: “hear and obey.” Have we surpassed this? Since we generate more YouTube content in a day than what Jesus put out in his life, since we have amassed knowledge, since we now have science… does “hear and obey” actually stand up to modern standards?

I made a short list of why “hear and obey” is greater than “know and do.” There are self-help industries (that make people helpless) and social media influencers and university systems that grease the wheels of their...

 How should we rethink our ordering of businesses?

God is infinite and personal, so we do well to personalize this God-man connection. Jesus came to earth and talked more about a new kingdom than anything else, a realm where his will is done, no matter the old modus operandi or political climate of the day. This practically spiritual “shadow government” where people pray daily “Your kingdom come, your will be done” is a better way of thinking and living, a way of obedience and surrender rather than grabbing and power. Also, Jesus said, “follow me” not “do this and that” and kingdom of God people seek to emulate his strategy: “I only do what I see the Father doing.” This is easier said than done, of course, and we would be up the creek called Great Aspirations or Impossible Dreams BUT…

Jesus knew then and knows now that emulating his life without his fuel source is impossible. To make this upside kingdom a...

We live in a world with loads of information, mounds of data, and many, many choices. Are we so bombarded with short bursts of information that our grid for sifting the important from the mundane gets shredded, let alone clogged? Does this dull us to the key inflection points in life?

And, to compound matters, we are spoiled for choice. We can educate ourselves through social media, free classes online, access to interesting topics and the best minds on podcasts, and more. Daily we make choices about what to bring into our lives and feel we are the masters of our own destiny. Good choices get easily infiltrated by reels and memes and clickbait, the junk food of our inner life. If we don’t recognize the difference between an everyday decision and an inflection point we will be so satiated by junk food that we miss the big meals of life. Putting it another way, if we treat inflection points as we treat routine decisions, we will fail to take strategic advantage of them.

What is...

Holding to the truth when error screams in your face.

Outrage seems to be the language of the day. If you say something with enough force, many emojis (since you are too lazy to find real words), and an abundance of bandwagon hashtags, your cause de jour may trend. Copy and paste, retweet, and forward… you can start a movement. 

Back in the day when email was a new invention someone dubbed it as “spreading darkness at the speed of light.” This is even more true today when spontaneous beats are thoughtful. Speaking of spontaneous, have you signed up for BeReal yet? (Most of you haven’t… I know since I only have one friend on the app… and he doesn’t respond. It works by sending users a simultaneous once-a-day push notification declaring it is “time to BeReal”. A two-minute timer counts down; users must let the app take a picture with their smartphone camera and then upload it to BeReal.) But I digress. 

Two weeks ago...

Anyone who has been around longer than the Internet knows the Beatles lyric, “I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love.” Many Boomers belted out this song and then went on to pursue careers that chased money. Even hippies of note trod the money trail eventually. Each successive generation of college students dreams of reinventing the economy but seldom does, perhaps because college debt locks them in the system. I am not going to go on a tangent about whether we now might do this with circular economies, blockchain, and crypto: I want to take us in a different direction by saying the Beatles were wrong: money can buy love.

It is the end of March 2022 as I write this. The blunt and brutal Russian invasion of the Ukraine persists. People are huddled in basements and bunkers. The underground train stations buried deep under Kyiv—I was in them 30 years ago—are packed with safety-seekers. I know quite a few groups who are successfully...

You don’t need a genius IQ to figure out that the world is divided, split, fractured. Arguably, this has been the case since man broke the unbroken human-divine connection in the Garden. Since then it has been a ripple of billions of sub-fractures that have splintered society. Then came Jesus and he united the unthinkable, made one the implausible, and formed a family from diversity. There has been nothing else that comes close to His unifying embrace of humanity.

Yet here we are in 2022 with our paltry opinations dribbling precious unity away like desert sand running through arthritic fingers. We have avid covid camps, rabid pandemic politics, and infallible science splits where our opinion is the right one, of course. We are experts in masking, vaccinating, and herd immunity when the only real herd we have is the hubris herd stampeding through the narrow canyon of our limited perceptions. “We” know best; “they” are uninformed. “We” are...

If a man is lazy, the rafters sag.
Ecclesiastes 10:18

We sat at lunch one day with a team from our office. It was a farewell meal for an intern who had joined us for three or four months. He was a very likable chap, had a bright mind, and was a genuinely nice guy. For our part, we had put him in tasteful accommodations, given him a car to drive, had him participate in some interesting projects, and given him exposure to life in Silicon Valley when all was well in Dot.com land. So at the end of it, all my wife asked, “What did you learn from your time with us?” His answer caused more than one person to nearly choke on their Chinese food: “I don’t like maintenance.” That was it. The grand conclusion from the twenty-year-old on what he had learned from his work stint: maintenance sucks. 

The first to respond was our Information Technology manager (who, incidentally, spent most of his day maintaining other people’s computers). He gently explained...

The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and a sincere faith.
I Timothy 1:5

In the introduction to this letter, Paul tells Timothy his work assignment: “command certain men not to teach false doctrines.”  Later he says (in verse 8), "We know that the law is good, if one uses it properly."  There is a sharp contrast between a genuine movement of God, which has at its core "love, which comes from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and a sincere faith," and the complex formulation of institutions built around laws and structures and complexities made up by man.  

As we deal in business, we will write contracts, deals will be signed, and plans will be made.  In all of these things let us remember to have "love, which comes from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and a sincere faith." 

Reflections

• Is your heart pure?
• Is your conscience clear?
• Is your faith sincere?