Stephen Kuhn

“Have you gone too far for God to love you? What’s that sin that you committed that haunts you at night? You know, the one that if everyone found out, you’d be ruined? Consider that the people who Jesus goes to battle with are not the prostitutes, the downcast, the outcast, vagabonds, or drunks. It’s not the greedy tax-collectors, the broken down peasants in the countryside, the Good Friday thieves who were crucified on either side of him or even the Roman guard who nailed him to the wood.”

“In retrospect, you see things you didn’t think about. You didn’t date long enough to see how she responded to stress. You didn’t plan for all these expenses. You didn’t realize how tired she’d be after working all day and how that would affect her interest in you. You didn’t think it would be this hard to have a kid and keep it fed, dry and quiet. And maybe you didn’t think she would show up on your radar. . . the perfect girl who has none of the issues your wife has.”

“It does not take long for men to discover that their sin will work its way into their parenting. It starts in the hospital when they are born and does not let up until we meet Jesus face to face. Sin, in general, harms our parenting, but there are some specific sins that trip us up.”

“We don’t love others because we are good people, we don’t even love God because of anything in and of ourselves (1 John 4:19). This is great news for us. It means we can ask God—the same God whose power changed our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh and whose power enables us to love him—to use the same power to enable us to love our neighbor as ourselves.”

“What really bothers me is that Christians are so spiritual they can’t enjoy the fun and celebration of Christmas…and don’t want anybody else to enjoy it either. I strongly suspect they once received underwear as a Christmas gift that was the wrong size…far too small. And instead of exchanging that underwear, they just keep on wearing it.”

“Why would Jesus command us to be perfect when He knew it was impossible? Was He just setting us up for failure? Toying with us?”

“Kids learn to love what makes their parents light up. I see it in my own kids now. My oldest son brings me the Sunday comics, points out a good strip, and waits expectantly to hear me laugh. All of my sons are adamantly loyal to my college team only because they know that I am. And when I ask them what they’re thankful for, they’ve learned to add a spiritual element, because they know Who it is that I love.”

“So when temptations came, my main recourse was to white-knuckle my way through. And there was rarely a sense that the outcome was sure, that I knew my flesh would be subdued. It was like watching a live football game between well-matched teams, with real suspense over who would win. Praise God, I never acted on sexual temptation while married. But I did lose battles in my heart and mind frequently enough. This area of my life was managed but not joyful.”

“Porn is so compelling because it sells itself as the perfect substitute for real communion and relationship. It stimulates our desire to be loved and wanted to the breaking point. It is the ultimate fantasy of fulfillment.”

“[I]n all of my years of watching my favorite painter, I think that I’ve been missing the point. Ross didn’t just want to paint pictures. He wanted to teach other people how to paint pictures.”

“[W]hat if our cultural moment isn’t a death knell, but a trumpet call to something new? What if the church is only facing the loss of the deadweight of Christendom, while the Spirit gives birth to a fresh wave of winsome witness?”

“[U]nderneath all of our tragic attempts at finding masculinity lies something even more tragic: our shame at not being men. The surest thing a man knows about himself is that he is not one. He is not what he was meant to be. The shame of this resides deep in the core of our being, permeating everything we say and do.”

“There are many of you who have entered this holiday season with loss because of your spouse’s addiction. Whether s/he still struggles with pornography or is in active recovery, there are moments when we grieve what we’ve lost because of it. When we notice the sense of loss creeping up on us, we have choices about how we will deal with it, just as we do with any type of grief. We can pretend it’s not there, we can put on a happy face to get through the holidays and then cry alone in the dark. Or we can be real with our spouse, trusted friends, and Jesus.”

“I saw a bumper sticker once that read, ‘Sin Now, Repent Later!’ Truth is, as blasphemous as that sounds, it’s what most of us do anyway.”

“Because of Christ’s work on our behalf, we’re free to reject sin and its misery, and instead embrace righteousness and its joy. When we do this we’ll experience a flood of God’s grace in our lives, restoring us to the abundant life of walking with the One who is our Lord, King, and best Friend.”

“In response to the great exchange that has been accomplished for us in Christ, there is an exchange accomplished in us by the Spirit: unbelief gives way to faith, rebellion is exchanged for trust. Justification—our being declared righteous and constituted in a righteous relationship with God—is not made ours by works, ceremonial or otherwise, but by the exercise of faith in Christ.”

“As long as we define our relationships by what we shouldn’t be doing, we’re encouraging people to hide their shadow selves from each other and God as they worry about not being accepted.”

“On the drive from the Calgary airport to the hotel for our honeymoon, my new husband casually mentioned that he would need to find a criminal defense attorney when we got home…”

“This larger insight seems to be the point. What we see in each other starts with what we see in God.”

“I repeatedly find that when I meet these five goals—welcome, know, hope, plan, commit—in session one, the counseling begins on a solid foundation.”

“At the end of the main talk, 6 truths about identity were put up on the screen along with this question, ‘Which of these do you struggle to accept and believe about yourself?'”

“Behind Ragnarok‘s improvisational, eccentric vibe is a message about the walls that provide the boundaries of our identity and how they have to be knocked down and rebuilt over time lest they become prisons.”

“So what do you do with that if you’re a man who follows Jesus and takes the Bible as true, but you aren’t experiencing abundant life?”

“We live in a catastrophic world (add stronger language here). This world is seriously broken; nothing is as it ought to be. We also live in a time of evil unleashed on the earth (surely you see evil ravaging humanity). Therefore, in a climate like ours, with a total loss of meaning, with brokenness all around and even within, as evil rampages, any series of choices towards the good is heroic. In a world of hatred, any choice to love is heroic. In an age of staggering unbelief, any commitment to faith is absolutely epic. In a world built upon the False, any ongoing commitment, however faltering, to choose the Real is heroic. And in a world totally stripped of gender, to choose the narrow way of masculine formation is utterly heroic and epic.”

“With little effort and a whole lot of pride, you too can destroy your marriage. And any time you do, you destroy a powerful image of Christ’s covenant love for his people. Sadly, the world will be happy to let you get away with this murder.”

“When we sin, do we put ourselves in the pigsty with the long journey home stretching ahead of us? Or do we consider ourselves in the Father’s arms? There’s a big difference.”

“Jesus flipped that script entirely. Jesus knew that it’s the other way around: that we belong before we behave. Sinners don’t become saints at a distance, so Jesus drew near to them and loved them – and his love transformed them. “

“Relating effectively to LGBT+ people begins with a desire to do so, but that desire must translate into practical change in our churches. Here are 8 practical ways to begin loving LGBT+ with humility as a church or ministry leader.”

“Children are exposed to sexually charged programming, information and contact at an increasingly earlier age. So, we need to be intentional in playing offense. If we play defense, we’ll have to deconstruct what they’ve heard first. We want to be the ones who frame how our kids see the world.”

“I think human sexuality has been a subject that has been kept under wraps as it were. I also think the Church has not been good about having open conversations, because there’s such a sense of perfectionist performance that we’ve turned the Gospel into some form of moralism or behavioral perfectionism. So everybody begins with shame and shame always drives you to isolation.”

“The irony, of course, is that I spun out of control with my sin by following the constrained understanding of love and grace that was being taught to me. I spun out of control as I followed the religious model for how to keep my life under control. I spun out of control by not taking God at His word on love and grace.”

“Many men grow up so scared of women they never develop healthy relationships with any of them; they don’t actually get to know a girl as a co-equal member of the human race.”