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Acts 12 Sermon: power vs. Power

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In Acts 12, Herod has the crown, the chains, and the crowd—but God has the last word. A study of human power versus the sovereign Power of God. What Is Reverential Capitalization? Before we open Acts 12, look again at the title of this post: power vs. Power . The difference is one capital letter, and it is doing all the work. That little device has a name. It is called reverential capitalization — the practice of capitalizing words that refer to God as a kind of typographic bow. You have seen it your whole life: He , Him , His , the Almighty , the Lord — the capital letter signaling that the One being spoken of is in a category by Himself. It is worth being honest about what this convention is and is not. Reverential capitalization is a devotional tradition, not a feature of the original text. Hebrew has no uppercase and lowercase letters; the earliest Greek manuscripts were written entirely in capitals, with no spaces, so they drew no such distinction either. The ESV — the translati...
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Everyone Calls Esther Brave. The Bible Shows Us Something Far More Interesting Than That

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Everyone calls Esther brave. But read the text carefully and a far more layered portrait emerges — one shaped by loss, formed by faithfulness, and moved by a costly love that bravery alone could never have produced. She is on the mugs and the motivational posters. She is the theme of women's conferences and the subject of devotionals and the name invoked whenever someone needs to summon courage for a hard conversation or a difficult season. "Be an Esther." "You were made for such a time as this." The phrase has become so familiar it has almost lost its edge — a soft-focus inspirational banner draped over a story that is, in the actual text, considerably darker and more complicated and more human than the poster version allows. Read Esther carefully — not as an icon but as a person — and something far more instructive emerges. A woman formed by grief long before she was formed by glory. A woman who, when the crisis came, did not immediately rise to the occasion. ...
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1 Kings Explained: The Danger of Drifting from God

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1 Kings explained: discover how Israel's greatest kings drifted from God, and what their stories reveal about the subtle, slow, and deadly nature of spiritual compromise — and how to guard your own heart today. It rarely happens all at once. Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to abandon everything they once believed. The drift is gradual — a small compromise here, a neglected habit there, a relationship that pulls in the wrong direction, a success that quietly reshapes your priorities. And then one day you look up and realize you are nowhere near where you started. That is the story of 1 Kings. It is a book about kings and kingdoms, about political intrigue and palace drama, about prophets and false prophets, about fire falling from heaven and still small voices in the wilderness. But underneath all of that, 1 Kings is fundamentally a study in spiritual drift — and the catastrophic consequences it brings. Solomon begins with a heart so close to God that the two have personal c...
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