What would it take for church to become known as a place where grace is on tap
We need a renewed awareness of death, yes. But we need far more. We need a faith, in the midst of our groaning, that death is not the last word, but the next to last. What is mortal will be swallowed...
The question {WHY}, though, never goes away-- not for me, not for anybody. We keep groping toward light while living in darkness.
The novelist Reynolds Price says there is one sentence above all that people crave from stories: The Maker of all things loves and wants me. Christians still believe in that truth.
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...
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...
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,...
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...
Jimmy Carter taught a Sunday school class throughout his presidency, winning the grudging respect of reporters who had once questioned his religious talk as a political ploy. Even so, he lost many Chr...
Jesus was not crucified for being a good citizen, for being just a little nicer than everyone else. The powers of his day correctly saw him and his followers as subversives because they took orders fr...
Jesus did not eliminate evil; he revealed a God willing, at immense cost, to forgive it and to heal its damage.
J. Robertson McQuilkin...was once approached by an elderly lady facing the trials of old age. Her body was in decline, her beauty being replaced by thinning hair, wrinkles and skin discoloration. She...
In my lifelong study of the Bible I have looked for an overarching theme, a summary statement of what the whole sprawling book is about. I have settled on this: God gets his family back. From the firs...
Frankly, I have seen even more graceless, not to say scurrilous, responses to Barack Obama from Christians. The church has allowed itself to get so swept up in political issues that it plays by the ru...
As a counterbalance to the list of seven deadly sins, the church in the Middle Ages came up with a list of seven works of mercy: to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, house...
A philosophy may explain difficult things, but has no power to change them. The gospel, the story of Jesus' life, promises change.
A human being is not someone who once in a while makes a mistake, and God is not someone who now and then forgives. No, human beings are sinners and God is love.
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...