I have found that living with faith in an unseen world requires constant effort.
I do not know if that theory is correct, but I do know that singling out one behavior as sin and emphasizing it over others provides a convenient way of dodging our own need for grace. High-minded mor...
Health and life, I would say, in the full and final sense of those words, are not what we die out of, but what we die into
God is the ultimate judge of hypocrisy in the church, I decided; I would leave such judgment in God’s capable hands. I began to relax and grow softer, more forgiving of others. After all, who has a pe...
From such experiments Christians have learned that the gospel grows best from the bottom up rather than being imposed from the top down.
Everywhere a greater joy is preceded by a greater suffering,
Eugene Peterson hace un contraste entre Agustín y Pelagio, dos teólogos del siglo IV opuestos entre sí. Pelagio era educado, cortés, convincente y le caía bien a todo el mundo. Agustín había derrochad...
We understand God best, Dorothy Sayers suggests, by thinking of God as a creative artist. Imagine God as an engineer or watchmaker or immovable force, and you will go astray. God's image shines throug...
We pray because we can’t help it. The
Sometimes the only meaning we can offer a suffering person is the assurance that their suffering, which has no apparent meaning for them, has a meaning for us.
Playing off a short story by H. G. Wells, Simone Weil drew an analogy to a land of blind people in which scientists could devise a complete system of physics leaving out the concept of light. Weightle...
Paul says that Spirit lives inside us, detecting needs we cannot articulate and expressing them in a language we cannot comprehend. When we don’t know what to pray, he fills in the blanks. Evidently,...
Our need to give is every bit as desperate as the poor’s need to receive.
Never do I see Jesus lecturing people on the need to accept blindness or lameness as an expression of God’s secret will; rather, he healed them.
My publisher conducted a website poll, and of the 678 respondents only 23 felt satisfied with the time they were spending in prayer. That
In a letter to his brother, C. S. Lewis mentioned that he prayed every night for the people he was most tempted to hate, with Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini heading the list. In another letter he wrote...
I can worry myself into a state of spiritual ennui over questions like What good does it do to pray if God already knows everything? Jesus silences such questions: he prayed, so should we.
Humility is the real Christian virtue, says Nouwen. When we come to realize that . . . only God saves, then we are free to serve, then we can live truly humble lives.
Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.
God does some of God’s best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.