Sin is not simply doing bad things, it is putting good things in the place of God. So the only solution is not simply to change our behavior, but to reorient and center the entire heart and life on Go...
Pieper argues that leisure is not the mere absence of work, but an attitude of mind or soul in which you are able to contemplate and enjoy things as they are in themselves, without regard to their val...
Our goal is to feed your imagination and stir your action with the richness of what the Christian faith says (directly and indirectly) about this inexhaustible subject.
Obviously, to be in the fear of the Lord is not to be scared of the Lord, even though the Hebrew word has overtones of respect and awe. Fear in the Bible means to be overwhelmed, to be controlled by s...
In a penetrating insight, Bauckham writes that belief in the story of salvation also breaks the cycle by which the oppressed become oppressors in their turn.47 In the Old Testament the Israelites are...
If you are younger, it is natural to say to yourself, I have heard about these disillusioned celebrities and wealthy people who say their life isn’t happy. But if I get anything like what I’m hoping f...
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.
Idolatries of the heart lead to foolishness in the life.
Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others…but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a...
He was a perfectionist, always unhappy with what he had produced, often distracted from more important issues by fussing over less important details, prone to worry and procrastination.
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.
God is the only person from whom you can hide nothing. Before him you will unavoidably come to see yourself in a new, unique light. Prayer, therefore, leads to a self-knowledge that is impossible to a...
Externalities are to do with our doing; internalities have to do with our being; and Christianity is about who I am in Christ, not what I do for Him.
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...
It is far harder than we think to have a self-identity that doesn’t lead to exclusion. The real culture war is taking place inside our own disordered hearts, wracked by inordinate desires for things t...
Whatever God's reasons for such diversity, creativity, and sophistication in the universe, on earth, and in our own bodies, the point of it all is His glory. God's art speaks of Himself, reflecting wh...
Truth without love ruins the oneness, and love without truth gives the illusion of unity but actually stops the journey and the growth. The solution is grace. The experience of Jesus's grace makes it...
Through faith in the cross we get a new foundation for an identity that both humbles us out of our egoism yet is so infallibly secure in love that we are enabled to embrace rather than exclude those w...
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...