It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as God's will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe you - try to share some of their...
You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.
Near the end of his [Jesus'] life, he struggles with a complete embrace of his mission. "If it is possible, let this cup pass from me," he says, hoping that perhaps suffering is not what God intends (Matthew 26:39). But somehow he realizes, through prayer and...
The human race is, was, and probably always will be deeply unwilling to accept a human messiah. We don't want to be saved in our humanity; we want to be fished out of it. We crucified Jesus, not because he was God, but because he blasphemed: He claimed to be God and...
The truth that the cross of Christ embodies about us is certainly that we are loved by God, but that we are loved as prodigals, as problematic creatures, as beings whose alienation from God, from one another, from ourselves, and from the inarticulate creation is so...
Luther said, "Remember your baptism." How can people do that? In Luther's church, most of the baptisms were of infants. They were brought by their mothers and fathers and they were baptized. So how could they remember their baptisms? Luther knew that when they became...
It's funny, isn't it? You can preach a judgmental and vengeful and angry God and nobody will mind. But you start preaching a God that is too accepting, too loving, too forgiving, too merciful, too kind...and you are in trouble.
As a company of Christ's people we should accept those who hold another view from our own in a spirit of Christian tolerance--which is not something that tolerates anything because it doesn't care which is right, but a spirit which accepts that as human beings we...
Everybody needs to dream the dream of a better life, a better world. But there is such a thing as failing to accept life as it is to the point that we miss what is good about it, too. "The greatest part of our happiness," Martha Washington wrote, "depends on our...
Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone's lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don't have to compromise...