Mark Batterson's Blog, page 15

Kiss the Wave

I have a friend who has had a migraine for five years. Moments of relief are few and far between. The pain became so debilitating that he eventually had to resign from the church he was pastoring. He’s been to countless specialists. He’s tried a wide variety of treatment plans. Nothing seems to help much…

Flip the Script

Win the Day – Flip the Script January 3, 2021 On April 20, 1913, Sir William Osler delivered a speech at Yale University, it was a simple message. I’ll give you the cliff notes, “live in day-tight compartments”. Now, that is easier said than done but if you can pull it off, if you can…

Flip the Script

I was not voted Most Likely to Succeed in junior high or high school. I was voted Best Dressed, which is unbelievable when I look back at my yearbook! I consider myself below average at most things. Like William Osler, I profess intellectual averageness. I have, however, learned how to leverage my weaknesses. If success…

Day-Tight Compartments

While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Tony Campolo once turned an ordinary lecture into an unforgettable lesson. He asked an unsuspecting student sitting in the front row, “Young man, how long have you lived?” The student answered his age. Tony responded, “No, no, no. That’s how long your heart has been pumping blood.…

The Invisible Gorilla

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons conducted an experiment at Harvard University more than a decade ago that became infamous in psychology circles. Their book The Invisible Gorilla popularized it. And you may be one of the millions of viewers who made their Selective Attention Test one of YouTubes most-watched videos. The two researchers filmed students passing basketballs while

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 “...