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...
• 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.
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...
Those who mourn sense the rupture of a world severed from God and thus edge closer to the Father who promises to make all things new.
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 presence of another caring person doubles the amount of pain a person can endure,
Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.
Our need to give is every bit as desperate as the poor’s need to receive.
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 bold message in the Book of Job is that you can say anything to God. Throw at him your grief, your anger, your doubt, your bitterness, your betrayal, your disappointment—he can absorb them all. As...
On a small scale, person-to-person, Jesus encountered the kinds of suffering common to all of us. And how did he respond? Avoiding philosophical theories and theological lessons, he reached out with h...
Maybe God isn’t trying to tell us anything specific each time we hurt. Pain and suffering are part and parcel of our planet, and Christians are not exempt.
Law merely indicated the sickness; grace brought about the cure.
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.
Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.