God gives us talents and gifts so we can do for one another what he wants to do for us and through us.
Everywhere God is, prayer is. Since God is everywhere and infinitely great, prayer must be all-pervasive in our lives.
Could you explain to someone else how the gospel can (and should) transform our sense of identity? How much do you experience that transformed sense of identity? • In what ways has God’s Word encourag...
Consider, then, that the single calling Paul speaks of is neither a condition without any struggle nor on the other hand an experience of misery. It is fruitfulness in life and ministry through the si...
Christian living is therefore a continual realignment process—one of bringing everything in line with the truth of the gospel.
But the Philosopher startles us by arguing that even if you are one of the few people who breaks through and accomplishes all you hope for, it’s all for nothing, for in the end there are no lasting ac...
And yet, why do you think Jesus Christ came into this world through a pregnant, unwed teenage girl in a patriarchal shame-and-honor culture? God didn’t have to do it that way. But I think it was his w...
An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities, and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking t...
According to the Bible, God devised marriage to reflect his saving love for us in Christ, to refine our character, to create stable human community for the birth and nurture of children, and to accomp...
Without socially shared discovered meaning we have no basis for saying to somebody else: You need to stop doing that! Created meanings cannot be the basis for a program of social justice. Martin
When Lovelace speaks of warming oneself at the fire of God’s love, he is describing what it means to meditate on the righteousness we have in Christ through his sacrificial death. If we don’t meditate...
We all live as if it is better to seek peace instead of war, to tell the truth instead of lying, to care and nurture rather than to destroy. We believe that these choices are not pointless, that it ma...
To glorify others means to unconditionally serve them, not because we’re getting anything out of it, just because of our love and appreciation for who they truly are.
To be part of a whole, to become part of a greater unity, you have to surrender your independence. You must give up the right to make decisions unilaterally.
There is no more proper response to really seeing God as he is—transcendent beyond all imagination—than to be still and adore.
Theodoret, a Syrian bishop in the fifth century, likened the gospel to a pepper: A pepper outwardly seems to be cold …
Then, suddenly, the defense comes in with a new witness who can be proved to have been at the scene of the crime! The witness says: I was there, and she (the defendant) was not. She is innocent! This...
The gospel comes and turns them all upside down. It says: You are in such a hopeless position that you need a rescue that has nothing to do with you at all. And then it says: God in Jesus provides a r...
The fall of Adam and Eve (and therefore the rest of the human race) into sin has been disastrous.
Sin shrugs at God. Its essence is failing to believe not that he exists but that he matters. This attitude is deadly.