Taken as a whole, the Bible clearly puts the emphasis on what pleases God—the point of worship, after all. To worship, says Walter Wink, is to remember Who owns the house.
Rejoicing in suffering does not mean Christians should act happy about tragedy and pain when they feel like crying. Rather, the Bible aims the spotlight on the end result, the productive use God can m...
Prayer allows me to admit my failures, weaknesses, and limitations to One who responds to human vulnerability with infinite mercy.
Man and woman, in a world without suffering, chose against God.
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 mentioned that no one offers the name of a philosopher when I ask the question, Who helped you most? Most often they answer by describing a quiet, unassuming person. Someone who was there whene...
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. Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more —no amount of spiritual calisthenics and renunciations, no amount of knowledge gained from seminaries and divinity schools, no amou...
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...
From Jesus I learn that, whatever activism I get involved in, it must not drive out love and humility, or otherwise I betray the kingdom of heaven.
From Jesus I learn that God is on the side of the sufferer.
Faith in God offers no insurance against tragedy. Nor does it offer insurance against feelings of doubt and betrayal. If anything, being a Christian complicates the issue. If you believe in a world of...
Doubt always coexists with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?
Dependence, humility, simplicity, cooperation, and a sense of abandon are qualities greatly prized in the spiritual life, but extremely elusive for people who live in comfort.
Christians behave like spies, living in one world while our deepest allegiance belongs to another.
Christian faith, which is at its heart about self-giving—God’s self-giving and human self-giving—and not about self-imposing.
Can God forgive you? Of course. Read your Bible. David, Peter, Paul—God builds his church on the backs of people who murder, commit adultery, deny him, and persecute his followers. But because of Chri...
But those of us who follow his conducting through early movements will, with renewed strength, someday burst into song.
But the strength and beauty of age is spiritual. We gradually lose the strength and beauty that is temporary so we’ll be sure to concentrate on the strength and beauty which is forever.