For the Christian, Jesus Christ is always our contemporary and the present is always a day of judgment and of opportunity. Our task is not to go back to him but to catch up with him. It is not “back to the Bible.” It is forward until we can grasp the wisdom and...
If the bulletin makes it clear that Scripture is an important part of Christian worship, then we can be sure people will get the message that the Bible is crucial in shaping their lives as Christians. But when the role of Scripture in worship is negligible, when...
I love the Bible. I have spent more than half of my life reading it, studying it, teaching and preaching it. While I do not find every word of it as inspiring (or inspired) as some of my fellow Christians do, I encounter God in it reliably enough to commit myself on a...
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...
The birth of Christ in our souls is for a purpose beyond ourselves: it is because his manifestation in the world must be through us. Every Christian is, as it were, part of the dust-laden air which shall radiate the glowing epiphany of God, catch and reflect his...
Little by little, Christians became devoted to their comforts instead: the soft couch, the flannel sheets, the leg of lamb roasted with rosemary. These things made them feel safe and cared for—if not by God, then by themselves. They decided there was no contradiction...
The Kingdom is served in greater ways when Christians and churches are collaborating and cooperating to proclaim the Gospel and minister to human need… The call and challenge for each individual, each church, and for all of us as a Fellowship, is to be the presence of...
True Christian hospitality is not a recruitment strategy designed to manipulate strangers into church membership. Rather, it is a central practice of the Christian faith—something Christians are called to do for the sake of that thing itself. from Christianity for the...
Christians…live and die in hope. The Christian virtue of hope transforms the virtues of aging… It is why elderly Christians can bear the sadness of memory without being overcome by it, and why they can insist on the truth of a story that challenges the ultimate rule...
Gratitude is the healing ointment for brokenness. It is central to the entire experience and journey of the Christian faith. Gratitude and grace share the same etymology and root meaning. When we properly connect to God, our lives become an endless expression of...