Faith grows like a tree, by adding rings… A one-year-old tree is truly and completely a tree. As it develops, it doesn’t become more truly a tree; it only becomes more complex. In the same way, one stage of faith is not better or more truly faith than another… A...
The Bible is far more than a doctrinal guidebook. God’s Word generates life, creates faith, produces change, frightens the Devil, causes miracles, heals hurts, builds character, transforms circumstances, imparts joy, overcomes adversity, defeats temptation, infuses...
The Bible is a means of divine self-disclosure. The traditional theological phrase for this is “the Bible is the revelation of God.” In the Bible, as the foundation of the Christian cultural-linguistic world, Christians find the disclosure of God—not because the Bible...
If you lose your wealth, you have lost nothing; if you lose your health, you have lost something; but if you lose your character, you have lost everything.
Imago dei, the image of God… We resemble God in our capacity to love, to reason, to feel, to relate to other creatures, to imagine, to plan, to create, to contemplate, and in many other ways. We are an image of God. A scratched-up one, badly damaged by sin, but the...
Sometimes when I have not understood why God has not answered my prayer my way, it has been made clear to me later. Sometimes when it has seemed that my way has been done, I have learned later that it was not the best way. I am gradually learning to turn everything...
Music has the power of producing a certain effect on the moral character of the soul, and if it has the power to do this, it is clear that the young must be directed to music and must be educated in it.
Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.
At the center of the beloved community is good news—a framing story that calls humanity to creativity, harmony, reconciliation, justice, virtue, integrity, and peace, because these values reflect the character of the Creator whose world is our home and in whose...