Mark Batterson's Blog, page 15

A Celestial 360

You may feel as if you are sitting still right now, but it’s an illusion of miraculous proportions. Planet Earth is spinning around its axis at a speed of 1,000 miles per hour. Every 24 hours, planet Earth pulls off a celestial 360. We’re also hurtling through space at an average velocity of 67,108 miles…

Ring the Bell

I’m not sure what the dinner ritual looks like at your house, but we call our kids to the dinner table when the food is almost ready to be served. If we time it right, they have just enough time to wash their hands and pour a drink. Then I pray a short prayer because…

Find Your Own Calcutta

In some ways, Nehemiah seems like an overnight success. He rebuilt the wall of Jerusalem in fifty-two days flat. But the passion was internalized months before it was verbalized. The journey to Jerusalem must have taken several months. And Nehemiah experienced considerable opposition along the way from a couple of ancient thugs named Sanballat and…

Ministry Happens

When we don’t pace ourselves, we tend to miss divine appointments right and left. In fact, they seem like human interruptions. We get so consumed with trying to get where we think God wants us to go that we put on spiritual blinders and miss the Goose trails He wants to take us down. The way you chase the Wild Goose isn’t by going faster and faster. The key is slowing down your pace, taking off your sandals, and experiencing God right here, right now.

A few years ago, two Princeton University ps...

Cut-and-Paste Christianity

In the beginning, God made man in His image. Man has been making God in his image ever since.

Call it naturalism. Call it anthropomorphism. Call it idolatry. Call it what you will. The result of this spiritual inversion is a god who is about our size and looks an awful lot like us. And most of our spiritual shortcomings stem from this fundamental mistake: thinking about God in human terms. We make God in our image, and as A. W. Tozer said in The Knowledge of the Holy, we’re left with a god who “...

Time to Take a Stand

There comes a time when you have to face your fears and take a stand for what is right. That is what Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego did. They risked their lives when they refused to bow down to a ninety foot idol.

I’ve got to be honest. I would have been tempted to rationalize compromise in those circumstances. I’ll bow on the outside but not on the inside. I’ll cross my fingers while I’m bowing so it doesn’t really count. I’ll just pretend the idol is Jehovah. They could have compromised, but ...

Faith Allergies

Faith Allergies

Lion chasers experience the same fears as everyone else. I bet Benaiah was afraid of the boogeyman as a kid. But lion chasers have learned to face those fears. They have unlearned the fear of uncertainty, the fear of risk, the fear of looking foolish, and the countless other fears that could hold them back. Their faith has been defragmented. They don’t necessarily know more than other people. But they have unlearned the fears that kept them captive. And they all did it the same w...

God’s Grammar

I’ve forgotten most of the sermons I’ve heard, and I’m sure our congregation has forgotten most of mine. But every once in a while, there is a moment of revelation in the middle of a message that is life altering. That’s what I experienced listening to an old sermon by Dr. Charles Crabtree titled “God’s Grammar.” I found one little line to be absolutely unforgettable: “Never put a comma where God puts a period and never put a period where God puts a comma.”

When someone dies, we naturally put a ...

Little Nudges

You cannot make choices for others. And if your heart has been broken by an abusive parent or a rebellious child or an ex-spouse, that might be what you need to hear. You shouldn’t take responsibility for someone else’s sins, but you are able to choose your response. You are, in fact, a choice architect. 

If you are in a position of leadership, engineering opportunities is part of your portfolio. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a parent or a coach or a manager or a pastor. One well-timed compli...

The God Pocket

There is a subtext to the story of the Good Samaritan that is easily overlooked, and it has to do with money management.

The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. “Look after him,” he said, “and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.”

A denarius was a day’s wage. In today’s dollars, based on the median income in DC, this is $594 before taxes. What that tells me is this: the Good Samaritan created financial margin so that he could be a b...