Ungrace does its work quietly and lethally, like a poisonous, undetectable gas. A father dies unforgiven. A mother who once carried a child in her own body does not speak to that child for half its li...
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...
Those who observe suffering are tempted to reject God; those who experience it often cannot give up on God, their solace and their agony. The presence of so many in church on a wintry night proved his...
The suffering person faces choices. She can recoil in anger and despair against God. Or she can accept the trial as an opportunity for joy. I do not mean to imply that God loves one type of sufferer a...
The kingdom of suffering is a democracy, and we all stand in it or alongside it with nothing but our naked humanity.
The key is this: the main benefit of giving is in its effect on the giver. Yes, people in Africa and India need my financial help, as the fund-raising appeals urgently remind me. But in truth my need...
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,...
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.
Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and unpredictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives.
Novelist Reynolds Price said there is one sentence all humankind craves to hear: The Maker of all things loves and wants me.
Modern humanity does not perceive the world as worth God dying for. We Christians must demonstrate it.
Jesus’ death, he said, broke down the temple barriers, dismantling the dividing walls of hostility that had separated categories of people. Grace found a way.
Jesus declared that we should have one distinguishing mark: not political correctness or moral superiority, but love.
It makes a huge difference whether I treat a nonbeliever as someone who is wrong rather than as someone who is on the way but lost.
I fear that our clumsy pronouncements, our name-calling, our hysteria about important issues—in short, our lack of grace—may in the end prove so damaging that society no longer looks to us for the gui...
I could no more pray the Our Father, I could no longer call myself a Christian, if I refuse to forgive. Humanly speaking, I cannot do it, but God will give us his strength!
I believe Christians walk a mental tightrope and are in constant danger of falling in one of two directions. On this subject, errors in thinking can have tragic results. The first error comes when we...
How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible’s astounding words about God’s love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?
God had hallowed creation by separating the sacred from the profane, the clean from the unclean. Jesus did not cancel out the hallowing principle, rather he changed its source. We ourselves can be age...
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.