We know Jesus died for our sins. But have we really considered the weight of what happened on the cross? Hundreds of years before Jesus was born, Isaiah described a suffering servant who would carry the sins of others. Discover what Isaiah 53 teaches us about the sacrifice of Jesus, the depth of God's love, and why the cross still matters today.

Not everything we believe about God is actually true. In Galatians, Paul confronts Christians who had embraced a false gospel. His warning reminds us to examine our own beliefs and discover how Scripture, the Holy Spirit, and trusted Christian relationships can help us recognize the truth.

Faith isn't just believing that God can do what we ask. It's trusting him enough to submit to his authority, even when his plans differ from ours. A surprising encounter between Jesus and a Roman centurion in Matthew 8 reveals what genuine faith looks like and how we can grow in it.

Many Christians know that salvation comes through faith, yet still feel pressure to earn God's approval. Galatians 5 reminds us that God's love isn't something we achieve. It's something we receive through Jesus.

Christian hope is about more than going to heaven when we die. The resurrection shows us that God intends to restore his creation—and that means what we do with our lives right now truly matters.

Revelation 21 gives us one of Scripture’s most hopeful pictures of the future. God will renew creation, bring an end to death and suffering, heal what has been broken, and finally dwell with his people forever.

We often ask God to fix the difficult things in our lives. But what if he doesn’t—at least not right away? Acts 3–4 shows us another way to pray: not only asking God to change our circumstances, but asking him for the strength to faithfully follow him in the middle of them.

I understood that by getting married and then having kids, I would lose a certain level of freedom to choose and move as I pleased throughout life. However, I wrongly assumed that by willingly stepping into the role of husband and father that I would become less selfish. I thought that by relinquishing the ability to chase my whims, I would want the freedom I had previously less and less. I thought being a family man would beat out the selfishness in my spirit. The part of me that only wants to do what I want to do. The part of me that believes I am the star of my own movie. The part of me that struggles to put other people’s needs above my own. I thought after a decade of this life I would be a different person. But I’m not.

For many years, I assumed there was a formula you could follow that would result in children growing up to be well adjusted adults, ready to contribute to society. I thought that if you did enough things correctly, parents could help their children avoid most pitfalls, and would arrive at adulthood relatively unscathed. But as time went on, I started to see results that did not match the efforts of some of the people I had been observing.

I realized that I was treating my marriage like a table and not a garden. If I addressed something, I expected that issue to be resolved and stay resolved. Like putting a new stain on a table, I thought if I put in some effort once to fix an issue, that work should remain unchanged for years. I was an idiot.

I often find myself staring at my phone, ignoring my children for too long, and I assume that many parents end up in a similar predicament. To be clear, I do not believe that parents have a responsibility to be fully engaged with their children as long they are awake. I feel no obligation to focus my energy on them at all hours, or deprive myself of escapes into mindless pursuits to temporarily avoid chaos. I just think we could all do this a little less in 2025.

Whether you are a great parent or a bad parent, your children will enter adulthood with some scars and issues. This is the nature of life. This does not mean you should not try to be a good parent, but you absolutely should not beat yourself up when you fall short in 2025.

When a child hits their sibling, tells a lie, disrespects an adult, or any number of other offenses, we must decide if we will allow it or address it. If your kids are like mine, the number of offenses stack up so high and so fast that it becomes overwhelming to deal with every single issue. For most situations, I come in strong on the first offense. As the child continues to commit the crime repeatedly, my tolerance for the situation marginally increases as well. Intentionally annoying their sibling, refusing to get up and complete a requested task, and other offenses are ignored for a time. Sometimes I circle back around to addressing the issue with a somewhat elevated voice coupled with some borderline extreme consequences. Occasionally my reactions solve the issue. Many times, my kids lose some screen time, but they don’t reform.

Exasperated and exhausted, I recently looked to the only reasonable source of advice in this day and age: artificial intelligence. The most brilliant computers in the world surely know how to parent better than I do, so I was certain they would have the perfect solution. Below is the advice that our robot overlords would give to parents seeking relief from a house in turmoil. My reactions in parenthesis and italics.

For the first few years of a child’s life they are absolutely incapable of doing literally anything for themselves. Every moment of the day it feels like we, as parents, are personal servants for cute, but thankless, masters who have no shortage of needs and wants. And they’re mean when they don’t get their way- we miss a cue or step out of line, and we are faced with screaming, crying, perfect storms of circumstances and emotions that bring our lives to a screeching halt until we can fix the problem. And as studious as we are, we cannot always predict what will set them off.

I’m not here to tell you how to vote, but I am here to tell you how to vote with kids. The boxes you check in the voting booth are not my business, but if you are a parent of littles and you currently aren’t planning to vote because of the special kind of chaos it takes to somehow miraculously get you to the polls with some sliver of understanding of the issues, this is for you.

It is very easy to skip out on casting your vote when you have little kids. And I am absolutely not here to shame you if you simply don’t want to participate this year. People without kids (or those who haven’t had small children for many years) cannot comprehend the effort it takes to go to the grocery store with children, much less what a parent has to do to participate in the election process.

But if you want to vote and you’re running into a few road blocks unique to being a parent, here are the most common complicating factors you might be facing, and a few options for how to overcome those issues.

As our children grow older and build more meaningful relationships, we will start to encounter their friends in more significant ways, often without their parents’ supervision. Friends will come to our house to hang out, we will take small groups on outings for birthdays, and eventually our kids and their friends will be driving themselves, sometimes ending up in homes without any expressed permission from their parents. As our orbit starts to include more and more unaccompanied minors, parents must be intentional about making sure no child is left behind. If all parents will start to assume that we are partially responsible for the well being and safety of all children in our lives, I believe the world we be a better place.

One of the biggest lessons I have learned through parenting is how important team work is between the two adults trying their best to survive each day without losing their minds. When you have one or more humans living in your home who are incapable of making most or all of their own decisions, it becomes a daily grind to make a million small choices.

The discipline of writing down my thoughts and memories for my kids has become one parenting routine that I will do everything I can not to give up on. I have previously made commitments to spend a certain number of minutes a day with my kids without interruption, or made grand plans to create a meaningful one on one outing regularly with each child. I have told myself I will always do such-and-such with my kids, or that I would never do this thing that my parents did. There is a long list of commitments I have made as a parent that I have let slip away, but writing a brief note to each of them once a month is something I have yet to abandon or forget, and I will do everything I can to keep it that way.

Every person who ends up becoming a parent consciously or subconsciously walks into parenting with pre-conceived plans of what they will and won’t do as parents. Before welcoming children into their lives, they make plans and quietly set up non-negotiable standards and practices for when they have kids one day. But they don’t know how hard it is to implement those standards until they actually have the kids. But that doesn’t keep them from silently creating their list during their pre-kids life.