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...
This kind of foolishness is gullibility. The simple believe anything (14:15). They are too easily led and influenced. Like children, they may be overimpressed by the spectacular and dramatic, or they...
Think of the implication of the very term regressive. To reject the Bible as regressive is to assume that you have now arrived at the ultimate historic moment, from which all that is regressive and pr...
There is an old story of a king who went into the village streets to greet his subjects. A beggar sitting by the roadside eagerly held up his alms bowl, sure that the king would give handsomely. Inste...
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 Spirit does not make us wise in some magical kind of way, giving us little nudges and insider tips to help us always choose the best stock to invest in. Rather, he makes Jesus Christ a living, bri...
Screen first for friendship. Look for someone who understands you better than you do yourself, who makes you a better person just by being around them. And then explore whether that friendship could b...
Our pleasure and our duty, though opposite before; Since we have seen his beauty, are joined to part no more. . . . To see the law by Christ fulfilled, and hear his pardoning voice Changes a slave int...
Not Christians. We don’t expect things in life to work for good of their own accord. When we find things working out beneficially for us, it is all of God, all of grace, all of him. When things work o...
Just as Christian singles find their heirs and family within the church, so do brothers find their sisters and sisters find their brothers.
Jesus is the prophet Jonah should have been. Yet, of course, he is infinitely more than that. Jesus did not merely weep for us; he died for us. Jonah went outside the city, hoping to witness its conde...
Instead of trying to shape our desires to fit reality, we now seek to control and shape reality to fit our desires. The ancients looked at an anxious person and prescribed spiritual character change....
If our prayer life discerns God only as lofty, it will be cold and fearful—if it discerns God only as a spirit of love, it will be sentimental.
If I was saved by my good works, then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through, I would be like a tax payer with rights, I would have done my duty, and now I would deserve...
How does this destruction of social relationships flow from the internal effects of sin? If we get our very identity, our sense of worth, from our political position, then politics is not really about...
God’s words, however, cannot fail their purposes because, for God, speaking and acting are the same thing. The God of the Bible is a God who by his very nature, acts through speaking.
For the first phase of American history, hope was chiefly expressed through a Christian story that gave meaning to suffering and pleasure alike and promised deliverance from death. But then, under the...
Dorothy Sayers could write, What is the Christian understanding of work?. . . [It] is that work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the...
The illusion that if we find our one true soul mate, everything wrong with us will be healed; but that makes the lover into God, and no human being can live up to that.
The essence of sin is not [primarily] the violation of laws but a wrecked relationship with God, one another, and the whole created order. All sins are attempts to fill voids, wrote Simone Weil.