We feel pain as an outrage; Jesus did too, which is why he performed miracles of healing. In Gethsemane, he did not pray, Thank you for this opportunity to suffer, but rather pled desperately for an e...
We do well to remember that the Bible has far more to say about how to live during the journey than about the ultimate destination.
We are inconsistent, said Mother Teresa, to care about violence, and to care about hungry children in places like India and Africa, and yet not care about the millions who are killed by the deliberate...
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...
True faith does not so much attempt to manipulate God to do our will as it does to position us to do his will.
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 question {WHY}, though, never goes away-- not for me, not for anybody. We keep groping toward light while living in darkness.
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 Quakers have a saying: An enemy is one whose story we have not heard. To communicate to post-Christians, I must first listen to their stories for clues to how they view the world and how they view...
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...
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...
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.
Prayer helps correct myopia, calling to mind a perspective I daily forget. I keep reversing roles, thinking of ways in which God should serve me, rather than vice versa. As God fiercely reminded Job,...
People on sinking ships do not complain of distractions during their prayer.