Top Articles of 2024
My most-read articles of 2024 and hopes for the New Year
As a writer, it’s always interesting to look back on the year and see which of your articles have been the most popular with readers (it’s often not the articles you think will be most popular). Here are the top articles from 2024—three from my own site and two from Westminster Media, where I do a lot of writing.
The Idol of Self (Westminster Media)
East of Eden and the Human Condition (Westminster Media)
Books from 2024
By God’s grace, I published four books this year. I’ll call this “the year of fiction.” The Castle and the Clouds is my first fiction work for young readers (ages 8-12). The White Door is my first work of fiction for adults.
The Christ-Light guides readers in spiritual formation and Christ-likeness. Lastly, Insider-Outsider gets into what we call apologetics—how we defend our faith when talking with those who don’t believe.
Hope for the New Year: God’s Presence
I’m currently reading J. Ryan Lister’s book The Presence of God (Crossway, 2011). It seems to be a dissertation published in a more accessible format for lay readers, so it’s packed with information and references. But the main idea is fairly straightforward: The presence of God is the goal of human history, and it is also the means by which that goal is accomplished. In other words, we all long for God’s presence above all else, and God has offered his presence to help us get there. God’s presence is both where we’re going and how we get there.
That means we should value God’s presence above all else. We should be striving to find more and more space for God in our lives. And what I’ve learned over the years is simple: if we want that to happen, we probably have to do less. If we want more of God, we need to pursue less of everything else. But what does that really look like?
None of us is (likely) going to become a monk or a nun and dedicate the rest of our lives to prayer and fasting—as noble a commitment as that is. Instead, we’ll keep living the lives before us, with all of the cell phone distractions and emotional roller coaster rides; all the embarrassing idols and noble loves; all of the dishwasher loads and trips to the food store.
Some of those things can be removed (and they should be). But many of the things in our lives need to become lenses. Right now, they are opaque. We pick up our phone and look at pictures, and that’s all we see. Or we take a trip to the post office, and it’s “just a trip.” We don’t see through our experiences; we see around them. And that’s the problem. Many of our experiences are stones rather than lenses. We need to learn how to see the character of God through them. That’s a key to accessing more of the presence of God in our lives.
Many of our experiences are stones rather than lenses. We need to learn how to see the character of God through them.
So, go ahead and make a list of things you can delete from your life if they only craze and confuse you. It’s always good to do a little house cleaning. But make another list of things you do ordinarily that will stay in your life. How can those things become lenses for the character of God? Answering that question might still mean deleting some practices that only add noise. You may have to shut off the radio when you’re doing an errand if that means you can ask God some deeper questions—just in his presence.
My hope for the next year—and my prayer for you—is to experience more of God’s presence in the ordinary moments. I want to taste and see that the Lord is good (Ps. 34:8) every day. If you want some ideas to start with, you can check out Finding God in the Ordinary. Here’s to a year full of God’s presence in those ordinary moments we all know are coming.
