If love is the soul of Christian existence, it must be at the heart of every other Christian virtue. Thus, for example, justice without love is legalism; faith without love is ideology; hope without love is self-centeredness; forgiveness without love is...
01615 – Worship is an Act, Not a Feeling
If Christians worshiped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship... Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship, our deep,...
01592 – Scapegoating
The word “scapegoating” originated from an ingenious ritual described in Leviticus 16. According to Jewish law, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest laid hands on an “escaping” goat, placing all the sins of the Jewish people from the previous year onto the animal....
01571 – Number One Cause of Atheism
The number one cause of atheism is Christians. Those who proclaim Him with their mouths and deny Him with their actions is what an unbelieving world finds unbelievable.
01560 – Being Christian: Following in Jesus’ Footsteps
Being a Christian is not essentially about joining a church or being a nice person, but about following in the footsteps of Jesus, taking his teachings seriously, letting his Spirit take the lead in our lives, and in so doing helping to change the world from our...
01518 – Humility: At the Heart of Christian Mission
Missiologist Lamin Sanneh says that humility is at the heart of Christian mission because this faith--unlike "spirituality"--must be received from another. No one is born into this faith. Nobody stumbles upon it after walking in the woods or rummaging around in one's...
01516 – A Serious Malady of the Soul
A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relationship with God. We read our chapters, have our short...
01500 – The Ideal of Kingship
It is this ideal of kingship that is manifested most perfectly in the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth. ...The ideal of kingship furnished the content for the messianic tradition, the tradition which was fulfilled in the life of Christ and which is the challenge...
01489 – The Purpose of Our Deliverance
Christians, we have maintained, are those who through confrontation with death are given new freedom from the sting of death and so a new freedom for voluntary service to others. Surely if this claim has any truth in it, then it is not our own suffering but the...
01469 – The Cost of False Fundamentals
It seems that a whole lot of people, both Christians and non-Christians, are under the impression that you can’t be a Christian and vote for a Democrat, you can’t be a Christian and believe in evolution, you can’t be a Christian and be gay, you can’t be a Christian...