The truth of the matter is, we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives altruistic and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter. Frankly, this side of eternity we will never unravel the good from the bad, the pure from the impure. God is big enough to...
To pray is to change. Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us. If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer as a noticeable characteristic of our lives. The closer we come to the heartbeat of God, the more we see our need and the more we desire...
When we genuinely believe that inner transformation is God's work and not ours, we can put to rest our passion to set others straight. from Celebration of Discipline
Confession is a difficult discipline for us because we all too often see the believing community as a fellowship of saints before we see it as a fellowship of sinners.
At its most basic and fundamental level, Christian meditation is simply a loving attentiveness to God.
Giving frees us from the tyranny of money. But we do not just give money; we give the things money has purchased. In Acts the early Christian community gave houses and land to provide funds for those in need (Acts 4:32-37). Have you ever considered selling a car or a...
Simplicity enables us to live lives of integrity in the face of the terrible realities of our global village. from Freedom of Simplicity
By inner attitude and outward action, we must defile money's sacred character. Money is too high on our list of values. As Thomas Merton observed, "The true 'law' of our day is the law of wealth and material power." For Christians, this giving of high priority to...
The proper use of money is not for living high down here; that would be a very poor investment indeed. No, the proper use of money is for investing as much of it as possible in the lives of people, so that we will have treasure in heaven. Of course, we need to keep a...
When Jesus uses the Aramaic term mammon to refer to wealth, he is giving it a personal and spiritual character. When he declares, "You cannot serve God and mammon" (Matt. 6:24), he is personifying mammon as a rival god. In saying this, Jesus is making it unmistakably...