Christians should not compromise in hating sin, says Lewis. Rather we should hate the sins in others in the same way we hate them in ourselves: being sorry the person has done such things and hoping t...
Christians obscured the good news by their efforts to restore morality to the broader culture?
Christian faith, which is at its heart about self-giving—God’s self-giving and human self-giving—and not about self-imposing.
Christ-followers need not live in fear, even when it seems that society may be turning against us. We rest in full confidence that God, in control of human history, will have the final word: The kingd...
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...
Bear one another’s burdens, the Bible says. It is a lesson about pain that we all can agree on. Some of us will not see pain as a gift; some will always accuse God of being unfair for allowing it. But...
Be careful, warned Nietzsche, lest in fighting the dragon you become the dragon. I
Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest, decided to leave her clergy position in part because of the church’s failure to administer that grace: One thing that had always troubled me was the way peop...
As a Jewish rabbi put it, A man should carry two stones in his pocket. On one should be inscribed, I am but dust and ashes.' On the other, For my sake was the world created.' And he should use each...
As I have said, the Bible consistently changes the questions we bring to the problem of pain. It rarely, or ambiguously, answers the backward-looking question Why? Instead, it raises the very differen...
Andy Rooney, the late commentator on the 60 Minutes television show, once said, I’ve decided I’m against abortion. I think it’s murder. But I have a dilemma in that I much prefer the pro-choice to the...
Always, no matter the circumstances, we have the assurance of Immanuel, which simply means God with us.
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, Well isn’t that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I’ll figure out what we’re going to do...
Absolute ideals and absolute grace: after learning that dual message from Russian novelists, I returned to Jesus and found that it suffuses his teaching throughout the Gospels and especially in the Se...
A grace-full Christian is one who looks at the world through grace-tinted lenses.
A counselor, David Seamands, summed up his career this way: Many years ago I was driven to the conclusion that the two major causes of most emotional problems among evangelical Christians are th...
See the confusion of politics and religion as one of the greatest barriers to grace. C. S. Lewis once said that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with po...
And said, almost without thinking, Well, of course, Philip, God was already present in the prison. I just had to make him visible. I have often thought of that line from Joanna, which would make a fin...
Where did our sense of beauty and pleasure come from? That seems to me a huge question—the philosophical equivalent, for atheists, to the problem of pain for Christians. The Teacher’s answer is clear:...