Is it possible for God to hear the prayers of various believers differently due to their godliness? Or, to put it a slightly different way, can our lack of godliness, or a specific sin in our life, hinder our prayers before God? This is a subject that needs careful treatment. A quick yes or no to these questions may reveal a lack of sensitivity to what the Scriptures have to say about the prayers of God’s people. Let’s look at what God has to say.

A front-page article in Wednesday’s New York Times was so helpful on the topic of microaggression: Rather than the speculative bloviating that has been par for the course in this discussion, it offers some actual reporting on how microaggresions are being used to teach college students about diversity and tolerance. The story centers on Clark University, a progressive liberal-arts school in Worcester, Massachusetts, that has embraced microaggressions as a pedagogical tool for incoming freshmen.

I have become increasingly convinced in both my own personal experience as well as in my conversations with many pastoral colleagues that the Sunday to Monday Gap is wider and more prominent than we care to admit. An inconvenient truth is that some of our more thoughtful congregants have a more clear perspective of their work as worship than their fog-shrouded pastors.

If we just live good enough lives, we can forgo the conversation entirely, and people around us will almost magically come to know Jesus through our good actions and selfless character. This style of evangelism is becoming more and more prevalent in a culture constantly looking for the fast track and simple fix.

I often hear from Christians who want to find a mentor, but aren’t sure how to go about that. Often these believers know they would benefit from this kind of relationship, but they don’t know how it starts or what they should be doing. Here is some guidance on finding a mentor:

We each have an inevitable racial bias, a cultural lens through which we see the world. My tenets unavoidably begin with a caucasian bent as I apply them to my own heart. But racist tendencies are underneath the skin, in the heart of who we are as human beings, just as surely as pride and its countless expressions. Whether our racism is directed toward whites, blacks, or other ethnicities, it flows from ignorance, apathy, fear, judgment, and self-righteousness.

In our efforts to make Scripture more entertaining, we actually confirm suspicions that it is in fact boring and irrelevant. And when youth workers aren’t as cool as they think they are, their efforts end up looking cheesy, which is the last thing that will help a teenager see the Bible’s importance. So how do you break through to a young person so they see Scripture’s significance?

In this podcast, Andrew Wilson asks the question: “How should we respond to people whose experience of their gender doesn’t fit with their biological sex? Or who have taken measures to change it? Or whose biological sex is unclear? What does love look like?”

In his study of the Ten Commandments, the famous Puritan Thomas Watson cites twelve ways in which we take God’s name in vain. Among them are using God’s name irreverently, professing His name but not living according to our profession, worshiping Him externally but not in heart, misusing His Word, falsifying our promises, and speaking without care for the honor of God. It is a sobering analysis, intended not to micromanage our behavior but to show us how the third commandment permeates the whole of life.

As soon as Eric Gibbs stepped onto the Tohono O'odham Nation, one of the largest Native American reservations in the country, he felt a love for the people there. "After seeing the needs of that community, I knew my time in Arizona would be more than just a week," Gibbs said of the short-term mission trip he took as a college student, a trip he didn't think much about beforehand.