Faith is not simply a private matter, or something we practice once a week at church. Rather, it should have a contagious effect on the broader world. Jesus used these images to illustrate his kingdom...
Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer. Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn't act the way...
• You don’t listen to me. • You judge me. • Your faith confuses me. • You talk about what’s wrong instead of making it right. Reviewing these complaints, it occurs to me that Christians fail to commun...
You cannot earn God’s acceptance by climbing; you must receive it as a gift.
When a doctoral student at Princeton asked, What is there left in the world for original dissertation research? Albert Einstein replied, Find out about prayer. Somebody must find out about prayer.
Those who have known pain profoundly are the ones most wary of uttering the clichés about suffering. Experience with the mystery takes one beyond the realm of ideas and produces finally a muteness or...
The world thirsts for grace. When grace descends, the world falls silent before it.
The reason we fear to go out after dark is not that we may be set upon by bands of evangelicals and forced to read the New Testament, but that we may be set upon by gangs of feral young people who hav...
The first nation to separate Christianity from government produced perhaps the most religious nation on earth.
The fact that Jesus came to earth where he suffered and died does not remove pain from our lives. But it does show that God did not sit idly by and watch us suffer in isolation. He became one of us. T...
The church works best as a separate force, a conscience to society that keeps itself at arm’s length from the state. The closer it gets, the less effectively it can challenge the surrounding culture a...
Politics draws lines between people; in contrast, Jesus’ love cuts across those lines and dispenses grace.
One more, final question came from the audience on my last night in Newtown, and it was the one I most did not want to hear: Will God protect my child?I stayed silent for what seemed like minutes. Mor...
One man told me the most helpful person during his long illness was an office colleague who called every day, just to check. His visits, usually twice a week, never exceeded fifteen minutes, but the c...
No one who meets Jesus ever stays the same.
It takes great effort, and considerable faith, to keep the Big Picture in mind. In some ways it makes me feel utterly insignificant, in some ways eternally significant
In the presence of the Great Physician, my most appropriate contribution may be my wounds.
In a sense, Job must replay the original test of the garden of Eden, with the bar raised higher. Living in paradise, Adam and Eve faced a best-case scenario for trusting God, who asked so little of th...
If it’s not setting you free and enlarging life, then it’s not Jesus’ message. If it doesn’t sound like good news, it’s not the gospel.