Legalism is a subtle danger because no one thinks of himself as a legalist.
Legalism is a subtle danger because no one thinks of himself as a legalist. My own rules seem necessary; other people’s rules seem excessively strict.
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, who said little about how believers should behave when we gather together and much about how we can affect the world around us.
Jesus gave a vivid object lesson his last night with the disciples by washing their feet, like a servant. Parents know the self-giving principle by instinct as they pour their energies into their self...
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...
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. 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 is already present in my life and all around me; prayer offers the chance to attend and respond to that presence.
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.
For us who are Christians, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is proof positive that love is stronger than hate, that life is stronger than death, that light is stronger than darkness, that la...
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...
Don’t judge Christ by those of us who imperfectly bear his name.
Democracy requires us to recognize others’ rights even when we fundamentally disagree with them. It requires a civility in which I respect a person’s ultimate worth and seek to persuade but not to coe...
Contrary to popular belief, love is actually a reflection of how much we ‘honor’ another person—for at its core genuine love is a decision, not a feeling.
Contrary to nature’s rule of survival of the fittest, we humans measure civilization by how we respond to the most vulnerable and the suffering.
Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, h...