by Kevin Tillman | Sep 11, 2026 | Blog, Thoughts
It was just a Tuesday. Like every other day I was getting ready for work. Tuesday was staff meeting day, so I was moving through the same routine I had followed countless times before. Nothing about that day felt significant. It was just another day. While I was brushing my teeth and looking for a pair of matching socks, little did I know that the world was changing. Then, somewhere during the morning, I turned on the television. Like millions of people across the country, I watched as smoke was pouring from one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It was horrible, it was tragic. But, at the time it was just that. My thought process was somehow a commercial airliner had a malfunction, and I was seeing one of the worst tragedies in American history. It was that, but as we now know, it was actually far worse. Like so many others, the weight of the moment turned into an even deeper disbelief and horror. While watching live on television the second plane hit that second tower. Immediately the broadcasters knew, the viewers knew, everyone knew. In that moment, everything had changed. It was just a Tuesday, until it wasn’t just a Tuesday.
The rest of that day saw more and more catastrophe. By the end of the day, two more planes had been hijacked. One hitting the Pentagon. Another being taken down heroically in a field in Pennsylvania. We continued to watch as the towers collapsed. People jumping from the high skyscrapers. Almost 3,000 people lost their lives that day, including so many first responders that intentionally went into the buildings to rescue others. It was just a Tuesday, until it wasn’t just a Tuesday.
That evening people were looking for answers. We were all looking for answers. Where do we go? What do we do now? The country was in shock. All flights had been shut down. Life as we had known it had changed in an instant. That evening the church I served at had an impromptu prayer meeting, as did many other congregations across the country. This was a last minute thing. No time to rehearse songs. No time to prepare sermons. No time to advertise. Besides, what do you say in a time like this? So, we just opened the doors and the altar for prayer. To this day, I believe that is the largest prayer meeting I have attended. Without a doubt it was the most emotional prayer meeting I have attended. I remember tears. Those that weren’t weeping visibly, were most certainly weeping internally. The room was somber. I remember people that never prayed out loud in public, passionately praying to God. No one knew how to say it, but we all felt it. This event, this day was different. No one had answers. No one knew what was next. So, we did the only thing we knew to do… We prayed!
I remember that day. I remember that Tuesday, that wasn’t just a Tuesday. I remember that prayer meeting. Praying was the right thing to do. At the time it felt like the only thing to do. But, here’s the question that comes to mind 25 years later: Why does it so often take a tragedy to bring us to prayer? As we answer that, I admit that crisis prayer is real prayer. We should pray in those times. The Bible is full of people crying out to God when they are in distress. But why does it take these events to bring us to this place of prayer?
A deeper concern is that dependence on God that is awakened by tragedy is often replaced by self-sufficiency when ordinary life returns. This shock of the crisis lasted long enough to fill our pews, but it didn’t last long enough to change our habits. For a few weeks in 2001 we prayed with a desperation for God. Then, life slowly returned to normal, and so did we.
The battle cry of the country over those few months was “Never Forget”. It could be seen on signs, bumper stickers, t-shirts, memorials. It was everywhere. We said it because we meant it. We wanted to honor the sacrifice of those first responders, and remember all of those innocent people who lost their lives. We said “Never Forget” and we meant it. To this day, I would agree that we haven’t forgotten 9/11 and the horror of that day. But, could it be that there are things we haven’t necessarily forgotten, but we no longer allow to shape us? Could it be that we remember the tragedy of that day, but fail to remember the utter dependence on God from that day?
This isn’t just about that Tuesday in 2001. We do this all too often. We cry out to God when the diagnosis comes. We cry out to God when the relationship is on the rocks, or the job is ending. We pray with an intensity in the middle of the storm, but lose our focus when the skies begin to clear.
On this 25th anniversary of 9/11 ceremonies will take place. Names will be read and flags will be lowered. The videos and the images will be broadcast. We should remember. We should honor those lives that were unfairly lost. We should honor those first responders that ran toward danger, and the ordinary citizens that displayed great courage. But, perhaps we should also remember something else. We are still fragile. We are still dependent on the God that holds this world together. We still need Him, and we still need each other.
“Never Forget” should mean more than remembering what happened. It should mean remembering what mattered more than anything else on that Tuesday. We don’t need to wait on the next crisis to pray. Remember now. Pray now!
by Kevin Tillman | Aug 13, 2026 | Blog, Thoughts
There’s a big difference between knowing about God and knowing God. You can spend years studying the Bible and learn a lot about who God is. You can study His character, learn the theology, even dig into the original languages. All of that is good. We should want to know as much about God as we possibly can. But there are some things about God that you don’t fully understand until you experience them.
There’s a difference between saying, “I know that God is faithful,” and saying, “I know God as faithful.” I can learn about the faithfulness of God in a book or a sermon. But, I may not truly discover what God’s faithfulness feels like until I’m in a hospital room waiting on answers.
I can read what the Bible says about forgiveness. I can study the Greek words and walk through every passage. I can agree with all of it. Then somebody hurts me. Not annoys me. Hurts me. Now forgiveness isn’t just a doctrine I’m studying. It’s something Jesus is asking me to do. That’s different because now it’s personal.
Warren Wiersbe said,
“We do not understand and then obey: that is instruction. We obey by faith, and then we understand: that is illumination.”
I think Wiersbe is pointing out something we can easily miss. The Bible is instructional. We study because we want to understand what God has said. We need sound doctrine. We need good theology. And our experiences should always be measured by the truth of Scripture, not the other way around. But… instruction isn’t where it ends. At some point, we have to live it out. It has to move from what God has said, to what God is saying. That’s where illumination begins.
There’s something interesting about the biblical idea of “knowing”. The Hebrew word often translated “know,” is “yada”, it does refer to knowing information about God, but Scripture also uses it for something much more personal and experiential. To “know” God carries the idea of a relationship and a personal experience.
When the Bible talks about knowing God, we’re dealing with something much bigger than knowing facts about Him. You can know what the Bible teaches about God. You can know the Word and even believe the Word. But, all the while, still be discovering what it means to actually walk with Him.
For instance, maybe you’ve known for years that God provides. You’ve read about God’s provision. You “understand” it. You know Jesus said that your heavenly Father knows what you need. You’ve heard testimonies of God’s provision. You believe every bit of it. Then you find yourself in a season where the numbers don’t work. You’ve run out of pay before you’ve run out of month. You don’t know how the bills are going to be paid. You don’t know where the answer is coming from or when the answer may come. You pray, you do what you know to do, and somewhere in that season you have to depend on God in a way you’ve never had to before.
The doctrine hasn’t changed. But you have. Now when you say, “God is my provider,” there may be something behind those words that wasn’t there before. You know something of God that you didn’t know before you had to trust Him completely.
I think that’s a glimpse of what Wiersbe means by illumination. It’s not a new revelation. God isn’t adding something to extra to the Scripture. It’s more like the truth you’ve read about for years suddenly has weight in your life. Now, that truth you already believed comes alive, because you’ve had to live it out.
John 7:17
“If anyone is willing to do His will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak from Myself.”
Notice the order. There is a willingness to do the will of God. Then comes the knowing. We usually want it the other way around. “God, explain everything first. Give me the details. Show me why. Show me how. Show me where this is going. Help me understand, and then I’ll decide whether I’m ready to obey.”
But sometimes understanding comes only after obedience. Think about Abraham. He knew God, but he was asked to take some tough steps of obedience. Each step brought a new level of understanding. First, he had to uproot his family and go to an unknown destination. Over time Abraham got a deeper understanding of God’s guidance and provision. Not by studying, but by experiencing. Eventually he is on a mountaintop with his son Isaac. An altar is waiting. Isaac is about to be sacrificed, until at the last moment a ram appears. God provided! Abraham knew that God would provide. He knew because of knowledge, but he really knew because of past experiences.
These are times in our lives where instruction begins moving toward illumination. Some of the deepest Christians I’ve known weren’t necessarily the people who could explain the complicated doctrines of our faith.. They couldn’t necessarily trace all of Paul’s journeys on a map. They knew their Bible, but there was something else there, they knew the God behind the Bible. That’s different. They had walked with God. They had trusted Him through the tough seasons. They had prayers that weren’t answered the way they wanted. They had times where they couldn’t see what God was doing. They had buried people they loved. They had made decisions that cost them something because they believed obedience mattered. Through all of it, they came to know God. Not just know about Him. Know Him.
To be clear, I don’t think we ever graduate from instruction. There will always be more to learn from Scripture. There will always be places where our theology needs correcting and our understanding needs deepening. But we also don’t want to spend our whole Christian life simply collecting more information about a God who has invited us to walk with Him.
We can know more about God in a Bible Study, but we only truly know God in the lab of experiences. You know about God. But do you know God? Instruction needs to become illumination.
by Kevin Tillman | Aug 6, 2026 | Blog, Thoughts
I often share in my Bible study class my propensity to the sin of approval. It stems from a broken nuclear family. I have often compromised my own self, even God’s commands in order to obtain the approval of others. Many regrets in my life come from living for others instead of living for the Lord. Through many broken relationships, God has slowly entangled me from the obsessive need of other’s approval to living for Him alone. On days I backslide, a verse from Psalm 63 encourages me to repent and live for God once again.
Psalm 63:3
Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you.
The word for “life” in the Hebrew could also be translated in the masculine noun form as “relatives”. Thus, the verse would read: Because your love is better than relatives, my lips will glorify you.
I am not a student of Hebrew, so I do not know if this interchange is possible in this particular instance. However, I know the Lord spoke to me through this new meaning of the word. His love is better than my relatives, my family.
For those of us who have difficult family situations, this verse is comforting. The pain of family drama has taken a toll on me not only emotionally but physically as well. Yet, I alone decided to allow tears to become my way of life and the stress to become my constant companion. I could have chosen differently. I should have believed that the love of God is truly better than the broken family dynamics that kept me walking on egg shells. Unfortunately for me, I sought people instead of the Lord.
People come and sometimes go but amazingly God stays. God is safe, trustworthy, loving, kind, good, faithful, powerful, forgiving, and so much more. People are well, dysfunctional, me included. Our dysfunction can be painful to ourselves and others. When we hope to find eternal love in a temporal person, we will be disappointed, hurt, and even broken. Thankfully, the Lord’s love is better than relatives, better than anything of life. He will be with us even if others harm us or forsake us. God lovingly remains.
I spent many years living for others, only to be left wounded and abandoned. I hope for the rest of my days; I will live for the Lord alone. Truly, His love is better.
by Kevin Tillman | Jun 25, 2026 | Blog, Thoughts
This week I was going through some old photo albums. There were photos of me, my brother, and my sister as children. Pictures of my grandparents in the prime of their lives. A photo of my mom and dad sitting on a couch as two young teens that were dating. It’s funny the things that catch my attention now.
When I was younger, I noticed the big moments … the birthdays and vacations. But now, I find myself staring at the ordinary moments. Someone is laughing over the kitchen table that I remember sitting at for countless meals. Seeing that cluttered kitchen in the background, because no one thought to clean it up before snapping the photo. I find myself pausing on those photos that wouldn’t have meant too much to me twenty years ago. The ones that aren’t posed. No one is even looking at the camera. People are talking in the background. Someone is washing the car. There was another photo of my grandfather laying on the grass exhausted from work. Though they weren’t in the photo, I can picture his work boots. I can almost smell his sweat. At the time this was PaPa taking a break, but today it feels like a picture of a man that loved his family enough to wear himself out for them. Nothing about these photos stands out. There is no moment or action that is trying to be memorable. It is just snapshots of a life from a long time ago.
The older I get the more I’m convinced that the moments we treasure most rarely announce themselves. They arrive looking like every other day. It’s just another day. We assume there will be another dinner around that table, another conversation, another basic day with the people we love.
Most of the time we don’t even know what we’re holding until we’re holding a photograph instead.
I wonder why we’re like that? Why is it so hard to recognize a moment while we’re living in it? I’m not talking about the obvious milestones. We all know weddings matter, and graduations matter. We fully document the birth of a new child entering the world. These times are locked in and unforgettable.
What I’m talking about are the vanilla days. Those days that don’t seem important enough to remember. It’s just another day. I don’t know if you’re like me, but I’m often surprised at the random memories that find their way back to me. A conversation I haven’t though about in years. Or, riding shotgun in the truck with my PaPa. Or, playing catch in the backyard. All of these basic random days. At the time, I wasn’t thinking, “I’ll remember this someday.” Nope … it was just another day. I obviously don’t remember everything. None of us do. So why these moments? Why are these the ones that have made their way back to me? What is it about an ordinary Monday night that quietly settled somewhere deep inside of me. That thought that comes back years later as thought it had never left.
The photos I saw this week that moved me weren’t the spectacular ones, they were the basic ones. The kitchen table, the backyard, the family pet, the living room with that big old TV. At the time I was likely wanting to rush through them because they felt so normal, so boring. But, now, they are cherished memories that I’d give almost anything to experience again.
Why? Not because it was a fun moment. Not because there was excitement in the air. These days were as routine as it gets. So why would I give anything to go back there? Because what felt so ordinary then was quietly wrapped in love.
I wonder if familiarity has something to do with this. Maybe we become so accustomed to the people we love that we slowly stop noticing the gift that they really are. We stop being amazed by what once caused wonder. And then life changes … a chair is now empty, the phone stops ringing, the house gets quieter. Suddenly that ordinary Monday night doesn’t seem so ordinary anymore.
We don’t lose our appreciation for the important things because they become less important. We lose it because they become too familiar.
Maybe this is true in more areas than we care to admit. Could it be that familiarity slips into every area of our lives? The people we love, that home that we prayed for. Our health that we don’t think about until it’s interrupted. All of these ordinary gifts become so woven into our everyday life that we stop seeing them as gifts at all.
The more I think about it, the more I realize this isn’t just something we do with old photographs. It’s something we do with life. The things that once took our breath away slowly become part of the background of our life. Not because they are less beautiful, but because they’ve become too familiar.
Our relationship with God isn’t immune either. I think this is why the Bible consistently reminds us to “remember”. The nation of Israel was repeatedly instructed to remember the covenant, to set up altars as reminders. Jesus told us to remember Him with the Lords supper. Interestingly, the Bible usually doesn’t treat forgetting as an intellectual problem. Rather, it’s a relational problem. Maybe this is why God keeps asking His people to remember. He’s not afraid we’ll lose the information, He’s protecting us from something much more dangerous … familiarity.
We don’t wake up one morning and intend to love God less, we simply stop noticing the wonder and awe of being loved by Him. It reminds me of Jesus’s words to the church at Ephesus.
Revelation 2:4-5
“But I have this against you, that you have left your first love. Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first; or else I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place – unless you repent.”
I find it interesting that before Jesus tells the church to repent, He tells them to remember. That’s likely not the order I would have chosen. Jesus understood something about the human heart that we often forget. Sometimes what we need isn’t another reminder of what we’re doing wrong. We need a reminder of what it felt like when our hearts were captured by Him in the first place.
Love has a way of growing familiar if we’re not careful. It’s not less real, just less noticed. Maybe remembering isn’t about living in yesterday. Maybe it’s God’s way of helping us see today’s gifts with yesterday’s gratitude.
As I closed those photo albums this week I was all in my emotions. But, I had a new and different appreciation. These weren’t just old pictures, they were reminders. They reminded me that some of the greatest joys in life don’t arrive with trumpets blasting and huge fanfare. Often, they show up while riding shotgun in the pickup truck. They show up on a normal Monday night at the dinner table. And, maybe that’s true of God’s presence as well. Maybe today isn’t quite as ordinary as it feels. Maybe years from now I’ll look back and see how much grace was sitting in front of me all along.
by Kevin Tillman | Jun 18, 2026 | Blog, Thoughts
“I will rest when…” I’ve said some form of that sentence for years now. Once I get this next project done, then I can rest. Once things settle down, once we get than loan, once I finish this degree. The thing is, there is never a finish line. Life doesn’t happen like that. New demands are put on top of an already filled to-do list. Unexpected distractions enter the equation. The truth is we’re never caught up.
Wouldn’t it be great if you hit send on an email and you got a reply back that stated, “congratulations you have now completed absolutely everything”? Instead, most of us are always on a project. I mean, that’s not a bad thing. We need a purpose, and we are designed to work. But, we are also designed to rest.
Why? Because, we are designed to get tired. This can be a definitive physical tiredness, but not always. Often it is a soul-level tired. Our minds, our emotions, and our spirit are worn out. Somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that rest is that thing that we get to do when the things in life are handled. Work hard, play hard is the mantra. We have created rest to be the reward. But, God doesn’t see it this way. Rest isn’t a reward for hard work, rest is a command from God. Rest is a necessity.
I’ve even found myself not enjoying rest when I take it. My body may be sitting still, but my mind never got the memo. I’m thinking about the things I forgot to do. The conversations I need to have. That thing that is due next week. That project that is still hanging out there. This isn’t healthy, and I’m not just talking about physical health. It’s not healthy spiritually. If’s funny how we spend all of our time looking forward to a break, then when we get one we realize we’ve forgotten how to slow down.
Exhaustion isn’t always a lack of rest, it’s more of a lack of proper rhythm. God didn’t design us to sprint through life and then collapse at the finish line. His plan is for ongoing rest during the whole journey. Rest isn’t the thing we stumble into when everything is finished, it’s something we are supposed to do along the way.
We all need rest! The rest (of the stuff) can wait, because the rest can’t wait.
Have you ever sat in a rocking chair for an extended period of time? Not for thirty seconds, but for long enough that you quit looking at your watch (or the modern day phone)? That old chair doesn’t accomplish much. You’re not getting anything done while sitting in it. Bills aren’t being paid, emails aren’t being answered, the projects aren’t moving forward. All it does is just rock back and forth, back and forth. The crazy thing is many people will sit in one and say “I needed this”. It’s not that something is getting done, it’s that things are slowing down. Not everything valuable can be measured by what got finished.
“Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.” – Dallas Willard
Hurry is the greatest enemy. Not culture, not temptations, not the things of this world. No, Willard says, “hurry is the great enemy”. He goes on to say:
“You must ruthlessy eliminate hurry from your life.” – Dallas Willard
What that means to me is that we have to be intentional. For most of us if we aren’t intentional we won’t stop, we won’t slow down. Deadline after deadline. Project after project. All the things that aren’t done just keep piling up. Our job is to walk away from it and spend some time in the rocking chair!
The great thing is, because this is all God’s plan, rest actually leads to productivity. It sounds counterintuitive. It doesn’t make sense on the surface. I can’t tell you how many times in my life I was hung up on a project. Maybe it was something I couldn’t figure out. Maybe it was writer’s block. I just felt stuck. But, instead of banging my head on the desk over and over, I walked away from it, took some time, came back, and suddenly it all just flowed. Rest is essential, rest is beneficial, and rest leads to better productivity.
“Rest time is not waste time. It is the economy to gather fresh strength.” – Charles Spurgeon
Rest is such a tricky subject, because productivity is so glamourized. Go, go, go … this is the way to success. But, once again, we are commanded to rest. We are designed for rest. Not only is it disobedient to not rest, it is causing us to be less effective.
“It is vain for you to rise up early, to retire late, to eat the bread of painful labors; for He gives to His beloved even in his sleep.”
Psalm 127:2
Did you catch that? God gives to us while we sleep. And, it’s vain for us to rise early and go to bed late. What I gather is that we should allow the work of God in our lives rather than depend on our efforts so much. Sure, it’s a cooperation with Him. We have our role, we have our purpose. But, for most of us, we are likely overworked and under rested.
Maybe it’s time fo take a break. Maybe it’s time to spend a little time in the rocking chair!
We all need rest! The rest (of the stuff) can wait, because the rest can’t wait.
