True faith does not so much attempt to manipulate God to do our will as it does to position us to do his will.
Today, if I had to answer the question Where is God when it hurts? in a single sentence, I would make that sentence another question: Where is the church when it hurts? We form the front line of God’s...
There is only one way for any of us to resolve the tension between the high ideals of the gospel and the grim reality of ourselves: to accept that we will never measure up, but that we do not have to....
Theologian Hart goes on to note a secret irony hidden in the arguments of the skeptics: They would never have occurred to consciences that had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral univers...
The test of observance of Christ's teachings is our consciousness of our failure to attain an ideal perfection. The degree to which we draw near this perfection cannot be seen; all we can see is the e...
The surgery of life hurts. It helps me, though, to know that the surgeon himself, the Wounded Surgeon, has felt every stab of pain and every sorrow.
The only effective antidote to the wickedness around us is to live differently from this moment forward.
The apostle Paul had much to say about the immorality of individual church members, but little to say about the immorality of pagan Rome. He did not rail against the abuses in Rome—slavery, idolatry,...
The West too may find that prosperity and self-indulgence are not sufficient to satisfy human needs.
The Christian knows to serve the weak not because they deserve it but because God extended his love to us when we deserved the opposite. Christ came down from heaven, and whenever his disciples entert...
That, at least, is the vision of the church in the New Testament: a colony of heaven in a hostile world. Dwight L. Moody said, Of one hundred men, one will read the Bible; the ninety-nine will read th...
That is the kind of shocking accessibility conveyed in Jesus’ word Abba. God may be the Sovereign Lord of the Universe, but through his Son, God has made himself as approachable as any doting human fa...
Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.7-19 He lists hope at the end, instead of where I would normally expect it, at the beginning, as the fuel that keeps a per...
Stanley Hauerwas, named America’s best theologian by Time magazine, summed up the problem: I have come to think that the challenge confronting Christians is not that we do not believe what we say, tho...
Sometimes God seemed as close as his wife or children. Sometimes he had no sense of God's presence, no faith to lean on. God is wild, you know, he wrote. We're not in charge.
Some people worry that prayer may lead to passivity, that we will retreat to prayer as a substitute for action. Jesus saw no contradiction between the two: he spent long hours in prayer and then long...
Shouldn’t we be presenting an alternative to the prevailing culture rather than simply mimicking it? What would a church look like that created space for quietness, that bucked the celebrity trend and...
Novelist Reynolds Price said there is one sentence all humankind craves to hear: The Maker of all things loves and wants me.
Like everyone else, evangelicals have a right to present arguments on all the issues, but the moment we present them as part of some Christian platform we abandon our moral high ground.
Legalism may work in an institution such as a Bible college or the Marine Corps. In a world of ungrace, structured shame has considerable power. But there is a cost, an incalculable cost: ungrace does...