Doubting God is painful and frightening because we think we are leaving God behind, when in fact we are only leaving behind ideas about God that we are used to surrounding ourselves with—the small God...
Trusting God even when we can’t or don’t want to because nothing makes sense—especially then—is freedom, freedom from the pressure of needing to be certain when certainty has left us. Choosing to trus...
Rather than counting on the acquisition of knowledge to support and defend the faith, a trust-centered faith values and honors the wise—those who through experience and mature spiritual habits have ea...
And as I write this, Romans 13:1 recently made the rounds on the American political scene to shield the administration from criticism for separating illegal immigrants from their children at the borde...
I hear Aslan’s words to Shasta: ‘Child,’ said the Lion, ‘I am telling you your story. . . . I tell no one any story but his own.
We do not honor the Lord nor do we uphold the gospel by playing make-believe. Neither are those who engage the kinds of issues discussed in this book necessarily on the slippery slope to unbelief. Our...
We can’t get our minds around God. I don’t think the Christian faith is fundamentally rational, by which I mean it cannot be captured fully by our rational faculties—and in fact, more often than not,...
So let me say it in a way that the ancient Israelites couldn’t: when we are in despair or fear and God is as far away from us as the most distant star in the universe, we are at that moment with Chris...
As we saw concerning Chronicles in chapter 2, the Old Testament already does in principle what Paul is doing here: reworking the past to speak to the present. That interpretive conviction is seen time...
Watching how the biblical writers looked at faith as trust rather than certainty helps us through our inevitable uh-oh moments from a different perspective. These moments are not proof that faith does...
Testament Can Teach Us. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011. Kugel, James L. How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. New York: Free Press, 2008. *———. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to...
Then we have the Gospel of John, the odd man out. John’s story of Jesus is so out of step with the others that it is sometimes hard to see how he could be talking about the same person.
The life of Christian faith is more than agreeing with a set of beliefs about Christ, morality, or how to read the Bible. It means being so intimately connected to Christ that his crucifixion is ours,...
Doubt can certainly leave us empty and frightened, but that is precisely the benefit of doubt: it exposes the folly that strong faith means you need to know what you believe, that the more faith you h...
The period of the monarchy is not only the meat of the Old Testament narrative of Israel. It’s also the period when Israel’s grand narrative was written.
Doubt is God’s instrument, will arrive in God’s time, and will come from unexpected places—places out of your control. And when it does, resist the fight-or-flight impulse. Pass through it—patiently,...
The biblical writers were human like us, and nothing is gained by thinking otherwise. Someone might say, Well, okay, sure they were human, obviously, but the biblical writers were also inspired, direc...
To love as God loves means loving not just others like us, but those who are not.
A Bible that does things like this is not a disappointing problem that has to be explained away or made excuses for, but something to be embraced with thanksgiving as a divine gift of love, as we, in...
Today we don’t have a heavenly realm full of gods, but we do have a lot of banks, which means we have loads of banking options. Banks vie for our business by comparing themselves to other banks—We are...
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