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 has taken me years to distill the Gospel out of the subculture in which I first encountered it. Sadly, many of my friends gave up on the effort, never getting to Jesus because the pettiness of the...
Dependence, sorrow, repentance, a longing to change—these are the gates to God's kingdom.
C. S. Lewis shocked many people in his day when he came out in favor of allowing divorce, on the grounds that we Christians have no right to impose our morality on society at large. Although he would...
But the Lord say he won’t put more on us than we can stand. If we can’t take it, he’ll be right there beside us giving stren’th we didn’t know we had.
As a writer, I play with words all day long. I toy with them, listen for their overtones, crack them open, and try to stuff my thoughts inside.
As Paul Tournier said, Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no longer any opportunity for faith either.
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
Absolute ideals and absolute grace: after learning that dual message from Russian novelists, I returned to Jesus and found that it suffuses his teaching throughout the Gospels and especially in the Se...
A wise sufferer will look not inward, but outward. There is no more effective healer than a wounded healer, and in the process the wounded healer’s own scars may fade away.
Grace means there is nothing I can do to make God love me more, and nothing I can do to make God love me less. It means that I, even I who deserve the opposite, am invited to take my place at the tabl...
Why value humility in our approach to God? Because it accurately reflects the truth. Most of what I am — my nationality and mother tongue, my race, my looks and body shape, my intelligence, the centur...
Where is the church when it hurts? If the church is doing its job—binding wounds, comforting the grieving, offering food to the hungry—I don't think people will wonder so much where God is when it hur...
We should leave a worship service asking ourselves not What did I get out of it? but rather Was God pleased with what happened?
We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.
Virtually every passage on suffering in the New Testament deflects the emphasis from cause to response. Although we cannot grasp the master plan of the universe, which allows for so much evil and pain...
True health is the strength to live, the strength to suffer, and the strength to die.
To put the issue bluntly, are the Beatitudes true? If so, why doesn't the church encourage poverty and mourning and meekness and persecution instead of striving against them? What is the real meaning...
The phrase the body of Christ, expresses well what we are called to do: to represent in flesh what Christ is like, especially to those in need. The
The Israelites give ample proof that signs may only addict us to signs, not to God.