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The world is not telling you this. Someone loving you or not loving you has nothing to do with anything you do or don’t do. It has nothing to do with you. But the lie we believe that leads to pride that can also lead to boastfulness is that we need to earn or become worthy of love. When the truth is that if you are truly loved or truly not loved, it’s never because of what you do or don’t do. It’s never because of what you have accomplished or failed to accomplish. The person that loves you has …

How to Deal with Your Past Your past isn’t the problem. The problem is we refuse to move on so we end up walking through life backwards. What happened to us may have been good or it may have been bad. But if we stay stuck on that, we walk through life backwards. Then our past becomes our problem. That is always rooted in selfishness. In other words, I hurt someone and I am not selfless enough to repent. So my past stays in my future and I keep walking through life backwards. Maybe someone hurt m …

Love is always kind, but it’s not always nice. Love is all of me for you. Love does what’s best for others without regard for itself. If I know someone who is consistently living a selfish life, or is consistently hurting other people--it may not seem nice to tell them they need to change, but telling them sure is kind. With our own children, whenever they do selfish things or are developing a selfish behavior, it may not seem nice to put them in time-out or give them repercussions for their sel …

No, they are weak and afraid. That’s the whole reason they are monsters. Everything they are doing is a response to fear. Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson teaches young men they should become monsters and then learn to tame themselves. I rarely disagree with him. But I am sure he is wrong on this one. You can’t tame monsters. You have to kill them. Jesus didn’t teach us to tame ourselves. He taught us we had to learn to die to ourselves. He certainly wasn’t a monster. If you want t …

I spent most of my life defending myself until I realized that love is actually my best defense. But I’ll never forget coming to a place where I thought: Okay, Lord, if I am not going to defend myself, who will? And then realized I had to choose who I was going to trust. Who would I trust with my defense—myself or Jesus? It’s a pretty silly question, right? So, I choose to trust Him. And I still have to repeatedly learn to trust Him every day.  Jesus went to the cross for you. He saved you …

And if we don’t know this, we can’t love anyone either. If we don’t know what love is, how are we ever going to love anybody? If the harder we fight, the worse it gets, we are not fighting to love, we are fighting to be loved. We are watering the fruit and expecting the root to take care of itself. That’s not how it works. You have to water the roots and then the fruit takes care of itself. Love is not a feeling. It is a decision. The whole problem with not being loved as a child is not that we …

I guess it depends on what you mean by the word “unconditional.” But I think it is safe to say that God’s love is not subject to me. So, if God only loved me if I did or didn’t do certain things, that would mean that His love was subject to what I did or didn’t do. We all know that’s not true. God doesn’t love you because of who you are or because of who you aren’t. God loves you because of who He is. He is love. Now His love for you does not mean He approves of everything you do and that He is …

The problem with a soft heart: it’s not that hard to hurt. So, the world would say that we have thin skin because we are easily hurt. And then the mistake we often make is that we harden our hearts but keep that thin skin. When we do that, we are still easily offended but we just don’t care anymore. My daughter Grace said that one of the most important things her grandfather taught her was to have thick skin and keep the soft heart. I think she’s right. I Corinthians 13:5 Love is not easily off …

Have you ever heard of the word, altruism? Altruism is a word psychologists use in place of the word love. Why would they not use the word love? Because they either have no idea what love is or because they don’t want you to know what love is. I would suggest to you that they don’t want you to know what love is because their definition of the word altruism is the perfect definition of love. The reason that they don’t want you to know what love really is: is because they can’t teach you self-lo …

The Worst Thing a Man Can Do to Himself …is to fail to love his family. And he knows when he fails to love his family, it comes with all kinds of guilt and shame, and it should. But what most men don’t know is that they can repent and be forgiven. And if they don’t know that, the guilt and shame that comes with failing to love his family will eventually lead them to abandon their family, because they just can’t bear it. But the opportunity we have as fathers, dads and men is to repent whenever w …