Tim SiskDisciple · Pastor · Writer

Essays & Reflections

  1. Mercy Goes Out
    Grace3 min read
    June 14, 2026

    Mercy Goes Out

    Grace goes in. Grace goes out. The movement of mercy is never meant to stop with any one of us — and Matthew's own name on the list of harvesters makes that replication logic flesh.

  2. An open door, and the way continuing beyond it.
    Discipleship4 min read
    June 10, 2026

    We've Been Making Christians

    Jesus made disciples. Those are not the same thing. The word Christian appears in the New Testament exactly three times. The word disciple appears two hundred and sixty-nine times. That is not a rounding error. That is a portrait of what the early church understood itself to be doing.

  3. The Shield of the Trinity — Scutum Fidei
    Trinity5 min read
    June 1, 2026

    The Day Pastors Become Heretics

    Trinity Sunday is the one day a year pastors are most likely to commit heresy from the pulpit — and it's funnier than it should be, because it's true. The moment we reach for an analogy to explain how God is one and also three, we're ninety seconds away from saying something the early church spent four centuries condemning. But the God you cannot explain is not the God who keeps his distance. Inscrutable does not mean inaccessible.

  4. Ein Gedi, Judean Desert
    Pentecost4 min read
    May 26, 2026

    Rivers Will Flow

    On the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, while the priests were pouring out water at the altar and the crowd was at its loudest, a man stood up — teachers sat to teach, but standing was the posture of a prophet — and cried out three sentences that changed everything. The promise wasn't just that the thirsty would be filled. It was that the one who drinks becomes a river. You do not drink so that you can keep what you have received.

  5. Grace Without Claim — Matthew 9
    Grace5 min read
    May 26, 2026

    Grace Without Claim

    Thirty-two years of lectionary preaching, and I had no idea there was a second table set. When I found it, it changed the sermon I was planning to preach — and then the text turned on me. I know how to preach grace. I've preached it for three decades. What I was slower to examine was whether I had become, in my own way, part of the noisy crowd in the back of the room — present, fluent in the vocabulary, privately certain I already knew how this ends.

  6. He Opened Their Minds — Luke 24 and the Ascension
    Discipleship6 min read
    May 17, 2026

    He Opened Their Minds

    Most of us know more than we live. We know the stories, the books, the theology. We are, by every reasonable measure, prepared. And yet something never quite happened between knowing and going. The diagnosis isn't a failure of commitment or a lack of courage. It goes deeper than that. We confused knowing the Bible with knowing the person of the Bible — and Jesus addresses that confusion directly in Luke 24.

  7. Christ in Us — John 14 and the Indwelling Spirit
    Discipleship3 min read
    May 9, 2026

    Christ in Us: What John 14 Says About the Christian Life

    For many Christians, the spiritual life takes the shape of an effort — trying harder to be more like Jesus, from the position of being not very like him at all. It is noble. It is also exhausting. And C.S. Lewis would say there is something fundamentally wrong with it. John 14 offers better news: Jesus didn't leave us a model to imitate. He promised to come and live in us.

  8. The Opposite of Trouble — John 14
    Easter7 min read
    May 2, 2026

    The Opposite of Trouble

    The most pastoral words Jesus ever spoke were not "come to me, all who are weary." They were not "blessed are those who mourn." They were not even "it is finished." He spoke them on the night before the cross, into a room thick with fear, to eleven men whose world was about to come apart. And the opposite of trouble, it turns out, is not calm. It's trust.

  9. They Devoted Themselves — Acts 2:42–47
    Discipleship4 min read
    April 25, 2026

    They Devoted Themselves

    Acts 2:42–47 gets read as a church growth checklist — four things every healthy church needs to program into its calendar. But that's not what Luke is doing. He's painting a portrait of what the Spirit's aftermath looks like. The church didn't manufacture those four devotions. They were overflow. And the most freeing line in the whole passage? The Lord added to their number. Not the church. Our job is the devoting. The adding belongs to God.

  10. He Said His Name — Peter, the Charcoal Fire, and Restoration
    Easter3 min read
    April 18, 2026

    He Said His Name

    Peter had already seen the risen Jesus — and he went back to fishing anyway. When the nets came up empty and a figure appeared on the shore, Peter threw himself into the water and swam. He had every reason to hide. He ran toward the one he had failed. What happened next — a charcoal fire, an old name, and a question asked three times — was not a rebuke. It was a resurrection of a different kind.

  11. Wounds That Heal Wounds — Thomas and the Risen Christ
    Easter5 min read
    April 11, 2026

    Wounds That Heal Wounds

    We call him Doubting Thomas like it's his first name. But the other ten disciples believed only after Jesus showed them his hands and his side — Thomas asked for nothing more than they got. And when Jesus came back for him, the so-called doubter delivered the highest confession in the entire Gospel of John. There is also a question this text refuses to let go: the risen Christ could have healed his wounds. Why did he keep the scars?

  12. He Said Her Name — Mistaken for the Gardener
    Easter3 min read
    April 4, 2026

    He Said Her Name — And Everything Changed

    Mary Magdalene stood outside an empty tomb weeping, came face to face with the risen Christ, and mistook him for the gardener. What finally broke through wasn't a blinding light or a display of power. It was one word — her name. The holy doesn't announce itself the way we expect. It shows up in the ordinary. And once you hear it call your name, you never see the world the same way again.

  13. Palm Sunday and the Identity of Jesus
    Christology4 min read
    March 29, 2026

    They Asked "Who Is This?"

    The crowd riding into Jerusalem with Jesus had an answer ready when the city asked who he was. They said prophet — and they weren't wrong. They just stopped too soon. C.S. Lewis identified the problem with that comfortable middle ground: Jesus didn't leave it open. The full answer will cost you everything. It's also the only one that will save you.

  14. Weathered hands cupped open — John Newton, a Blind Beggar, and the Only Testimony That Matters
    Grace6 min read
    March 15, 2026

    One Thing I Know

    John Newton didn't invent the words in Amazing Grace, "I was blind but now I see" — he borrowed them from a man who had been hauled before a religious tribunal, pressed to recant what Jesus had done to him, and refused — not because he could win the argument, but because he knew the one thing they couldn't take away. This is the story of five words that have outlasted everything thrown against them.

  15. What Jesus Wrote in the Dirt
    Scripture6 min read
    March 12, 2026

    What Jesus Wrote in the Dirt

    Nobody knows what Jesus wrote in the dirt. John mentions it twice and never tells us. Scholars have been guessing for centuries — and that question turns out to be the opening into something much bigger: a complicated manuscript history, a canon the church preserved anyway, and why you don't need to solve every textual puzzle to trust what you read.

  16. Must Needs Go — Jesus, the Samaritan Woman, and the Appointment You Didn't Know You Had
    Lent3 min read
    March 11, 2026

    Must Needs Go

    She came to the well at noon — alone, on purpose, when no one else would be there. She had arranged her entire life around not being seen. And Jesus was sitting there waiting. He hadn't wandered by. He had rerouted his whole journey for this appointment. The question is which person in this story you are.

  17. All Their Lives — Fear, Death, and Half a Victory
    Lent5 min read
    March 5, 2026

    All Their Lives

    Socrates drank the hemlock calmly. Jesus wept and begged. The difference isn't courage — it's theology. The church has spent enormous energy telling people not to be afraid of death. Hebrews tells the truth first: the fear of death holds people in slavery all their lives. And we've been preaching half a victory.

  18. Photo by Nicole Herrero on Unsplash
    Lent4 min read
    February 24, 2026

    The Wilderness Is Not Abandonment

    When life goes dry and silent, the voice that fills the silence isn't God's — and it says the same thing every time: you must have done something wrong. But the Gospel tells a different story. The Spirit didn't lead Jesus away from the wilderness. He led him into it. What if your wilderness isn't abandonment? What if it's an appointment?

  19. Memento Mori — A Christian Perspective on Death, Life, and the Resurrection
    Lent5 min read
    February 24, 2026

    Memento Mori

    I was scrolling Facebook when I first saw it — skull imagery, a coffee mug, two Latin words. My first reaction was, who drinks coffee out of a skull? But the phrase kept showing up. What I found when I looked it up changed how I thought about Lent, about loss, and about a Rich Mullins demo recorded nine days before he died.

  20. Ash Wednesday 2026
    Liturgy10 min read
    February 18, 2026

    Dust and Promise: Why Ash Wednesday Still Matters

    There is a sentence most of us spend our entire lives trying not to hear. Tonight, a pastor will press ashes into foreheads and say it anyway — not as a threat, but as a gift. Why Ash Wednesday may be the most honest hour in the Christian year, and why it belongs with the most dangerous prayer John Wesley ever wrote.

  21. Close-up of a metal finger labyrinth used for prayer and meditation.
    Prayer5 min read
    February 13, 2026

    The Lesson of the Labyrinth

    A pastor walks into a monastery labyrinth at dusk — the path uneven where tree roots have heaved the stones out of place, the light fading fast, desperate not to fall face-first in front of a passing nun. He never expected what that crooked, darkening path would teach him about trusting God through the long stretches of life that don't seem to be going anywhere.

  22. Sacred Heart Monastery, Cullman, Alabama
    Prayer4 min read
    February 13, 2026

    My Experience at Sacred Heart Monastery

    A Methodist pastor walks into a Catholic monastery — and spends the first day and a half sitting in the wrong pew, standing at the wrong time, and wondering if he'd made a terrible mistake.