She must be able to say in her heart, My desire for completely successful and happy children is selfish. It’s all about my need to feel worthwhile and valuable. If I really knew God’s love—then I coul...
Prayer , then, is both awe and intimacy, struggle and reality. These will not happen every time we pray, but each should be a major component of our prayer over the course of our lives.
Paul looks back to this when he writes: I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. . . . For the creation was subjected to frustration,...
Luther suggests that after meditating on the Scripture, you should pray through each petition of the Lord’s Prayer, paraphrasing and personalizing each one using your own needs and concerns.
Lord, admitting my accomplishments are your gift is a bittersweet thing to do. It stings at first because it humbles. But then it is so very sweet and brings such peace. It is not up to me, and it nev...
Lord, I will obey you simply because you are worthy of it and it is my duty. But don’t let my service to you remain at that level. Show me your beauty—attract my heart, capture my imagination, so that...
Lord Jesus, you answered your opponents wisely and brilliantly but patiently and constantly. How I want to give back to my critics—with verve—the same disdain they show me. But I want to be like you,...
La mayoría de las interpretaciones de esta parábola se han centrado en la huida y regreso del hermano menor, el hijo pródigo. Sin embargo, así se pierde el verdadero mensaje de la historia porque hay...
Jesus’s own answer to this question, through the parable, is similar. He is on the side of neither the irreligious nor the religious, but he singles out religious moralism as a particularly deadly spi...
It could be argued that everything we do wrong—every cruel action, dishonest word, broken promise, self-centered attitude—stems from a conviction deep in our souls that there is something more crucial...
Indeed, it is the covenantal commitment that enables married people to become people who love each other. Only with time do we really learn who the other person is and come to love the person for him...
In 1961 the Russians put the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin. Nikita Khrushchev was the Russian premier, and he said that when Gagarin went into space, the cosmonaut discovered that there was no Go...
Identity apart from God is inherently unstable.
I have had homosexual friends, both men and women, tell me that one of the factors that made homosexual love attractive to them was how much easier it was than dealing with someone of a different sex....
God repeatedly refuses to allow his gracious activity to run along the expected lines of worldly influence and privilege. He puts in the center the person whom the world would put on the periphery.
Eventually you can instinctively identify the way your spouse would react to a situation, assess its wisdom in this situation, and adopt it sometimes in a way that you never would have been able to pr...
Do you realize that it is only in the gospel of Jesus Christ that you get the verdict before the performance? The atheist might say that they get their self-image from being a good person. They are a...
Christians, then, should expect to find nonbelievers who are much nicer, kinder, wiser, and better than they are. Why? Christian believers are not accepted by God because of their moral performance, w...
A theologically thick view of sin, by contrast, sees it as a compulsive drive of the heart to produce idols. This view should lead neither to withdrawal nor to uncritical consumption, but rather to hu...