The Israelites give ample proof that signs may only addict us to signs, not to God.
Prayer allows me to admit my failures, weaknesses, and limitations to One who responds to human vulnerability with infinite mercy.
Pain allows us, the fortunate ones at least, to lead free and active lives. If you ever doubt that, visit a leprosarium and observe for yourself a world without pain.
Man and woman, in a world without suffering, chose against God.
Law merely indicated the sickness; grace brought about the cure.
Jesus did not give the parables to teach us how to live. He gave them, I believe, to correct our notions about who God is and who God loves.
It was not pastoral teaching, or small group fellowship, or worship services, or books of theology — rather, they mentioned suffering. People said they grew more during seasons of loss, pain, and cris...
It is dangerous and perhaps even unscriptural to torture ourselves by looking for his message in a specific throb of pain, a specific instance of suffering. The message may simply be that we live in a...
I have found consolation, for example, in C. S. Lewis's depiction in The Great Divorce of hell as a place that people choose, and continue to choose even when they end up there. As Milton's Satan put...
God dispenses gifts, not wages. None of us gets paid according to merit, for none of us comes close to satisfying God’s requirements for a perfect life. If paid on the basis of fairness, we would all...
Christians behave like spies, living in one world while our deepest allegiance belongs to another.
But those of us who follow his conducting through early movements will, with renewed strength, someday burst into song.
Because of Jesus, I can never say about a person, She must be suffering because of some sin she committed; Jesus, who did not sin, also felt pain.
As Paul Tournier said, Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no longer any opportunity for faith either.
What a nation needs more than anything else is not a Christian ruler in the palace but a Christian prophet within earshot.
The promise of pleasures so alluring that we may devote our lives to their pursuit, and then the haunting realization that these pleasures ultimately do not satisfy.
Positioned myself. I once described the people I tend to hear from as borderlanders, those caught in a no-person’s-land between faith and disbelief. Some approach the church cautiously, attracted to J...
Grace is the only force in the universe powerful enough to break the chains that enslave generations.
We respond to healing grace by giving it away.
We have not, it seems, the power to abstain from worship. Instead, we swallow the sweet poison, substituting lesser gods for God.