Christianity is mainly wishful thinking…Dreams are wishful thinking. Children playing at being grown-up is wishful thinking. Interplanetary travel is wishful thinking…Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it.
There is no genuine Christianity where the sign of the Cross is absent. Cheap grace is grace without the Cross, an intellectual assent to a dusty pawnshop of doctrinal beliefs while drifting aimlessly with the cultural values of the secular city. Discipleship without...
Grace is Christianity’s best gift to the world, a spiritual nova in our midst exerting a force stronger than vengeance, stronger than racism, stronger than hate. Sadly, to a world desperate for this grace the church sometimes presents one more form of ungrace. Too...
Someone once asked Billy Graham, “If Christianity is valid, why is there so much evil in the world?” To this he replied, “With so much soap, why are there so many dirty people in the world? Christianity, like soap, must be personally applied if it is to make a...
Christianity, we might say, is driving around with a loaded gun in its glove compartment, and that loaded gun is its violent image of God. It’s driving around with a license to kill, and that license is its Bible, read uncritically. Along with its loaded gun and...
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.
It may sound easy to “allow the Spirit to guide us” while reading the Bible…but in a culture of consumerized Christianity it is also easy to stumble over preconceived notions about the Bible cluttering the path. Chief among such market-driven notions is that the Bible...
Christianity is about water: “Everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.” It’s about baptism, for God’s sake. It’s about full immersion, about falling into something elemental and wet. Most of what we do in worldly life is geared toward our staying dry, looking...