Darryl Dash's Blog, page 3

What Married Love Requires (Song of Songs 8:5-14)

Big Idea: Marriage requires a love that is costly and unbreakable, boundaries that protect the relationship, and a pursuit that never ends.

I’ve had the privilege of presiding over many weddings, and I love the entire journey. It's a joy to support couples from their engagement through premarital counseling to their wedding vows. I sometimes get to accompany them for years, seeing them build their lives, welcome children, and grow together.

As I watch couples drive away after their wedding, I ofte...

Saturday Links

Curated links for your weekend reading:

Why I Chose the Church With Worn-Out Bathrooms

Their hearts and their budget were set more on people than on their facility.

What to Do After Your Pastor Preaches a Bad Sermon

What do you do after your pastor preaches a sub-par sermon? What happens when your pastor is a normal guy who preaches normal sermons?

Here are a few practical steps.

How Much Church Can I Miss to Serve?

Serving children in Jesus’s name is beautiful and God-pleasing. Gathering for worship i...

Don't Just Preach the Gospel at the End

Every sermon should include the gospel. I agree with Charles Spurgeon, who said, “A sermon without Christ in it is like a loaf of bread without any flour in it. No Christ in your sermon, sir? Then go home, and never preach again until you have something worth preaching.”

We can't afford to give moralistic sermons devoid of the gospel. The good news of Jesus needs to be the primary message that we preach and the centerpiece of every sermon.

One way to preach the gospel is to include it at the end. ...

What Marriage is Like (Song of Songs 6:4-8:4)

Big Idea: A healthy marriage deepens through conflict and pursues joyful, holy intimacy that’s a reflection of Christ’s steadfast love.

I am a product of a single-parent home. For most of my childhood, I lived with my mother and my siblings but not my dad.

For that reason, I never had the privilege of seeing what a healthy marriage looked like. I’ve only seen hints of what a healthy marriage looks like from other couples, but that’s not the same as experiencing it consistently.

So I made a delibera...

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A Word to My Students

Sooner or later the time will come — perhaps in a job interview, or an interview for a place in a graduate program, or your second week in a new job that doesn’t have you in front of a computer all day — when your lack of the skills you claim to have will become evident, to your great embarrassment and frustration.

The High Price of Watching Nudity

Here are my reasons for why I’m committed to this kind of radical abstention from anything ...

My Favorite Blog Posts of All Time

I follow around 150 blogs and skim through a couple hundred posts each week. Over the past decade, that adds up to more than ten thousand blog posts. Yet, only seven have profoundly impacted my life.

Reading them again, I realize how many of them are simple, and yet they've shaped how I think, live, and serve.

Here they are, along with a summary of each and why they stood out to me.

Gospel + Safety + Time = A Church Where Anyone Can Grow

This is what our churches must be: gentle environments of gosp...

Saturday Links

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How Social Media Shortens Your Life

Social media platforms have been stealing our time using a sneaky trick: they’ve been speeding up our sense of time — effectively shortening our lives — so we think we had less than we did, and don’t notice some of it was pilfered.

Questions Every Pastor on Social Media Should Ask Themselves

Your people don’t really need your social media presence, but they do need your actual presence.

What Does It Take for Pastors to Stay i...

What Is a Marriage?

Many people think they know the answer, but I’ve found we’re often not as clear as we should be. What is a wedding, and what is a marriage?

It's important to base our understanding on what the Bible teaches to ensure it aligns with God's design. Lack of clarity about weddings and marriage leads to confusion in our personal lives, society, and the church.

In his book Christian Ethics, Wayne Grudem provides this helpful definition:

Marriage is… a lifelong relationship between a man and a woman that i...

What a Wedding’s Like (Song of Songs 3:6-5:1)

Big Idea: A wedding is a regal, passionate giving of one to another that is blessed by the community.

There’s nothing quite like a wedding. Even the most cynical among us can’t help but be moved when a groom stands at the front, waiting, and the bride begins her walk down the aisle. Their expressions and exchanged vows reveal that we’re witnessing something more meaningful than just the moment. And we are! Weddings give us a glimpse of something transcendent, something at the very heart of the un...

Saturday Links

Curated links for your weekend reading:

The Financial and Spiritual Principle of Compound Interest

Lessons learned when they are tiny do not easily fade but instead accumulate and bear fruit over a lifetime.

The Case Stott Made for Christian Social Involvement

If we are to be Christlike, we too should feel anger at injustice and compassion for its victims.

Selective Admiration: Why You Don’t Need Perfect Heroes

When we abandon the myth of the perfect hero, something liberating happens: we stop waiting...