Behold, Lord, an empty vessel that needs to be filled. My Lord, fill it. I am weak in the faith; strengthen me. I am cold in love; warm me and make me fervent, that my love may go out to my neighbor.
01317 – Fervent Prayer
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01296 – Maybe Your Faith Needs Some Reflection?
Christians began as a politically unimportant offshoot of Judaism in the Roman Empire. The early Christians found ways to live faithfully from one Caesar to another. If your faith is shattered by the politics of the moment, it may be your faith that needs some...
01267 – Faith and Obedience
For faith is only real when there is obedience, never without, and faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience. Since, then, we cannot adequately speak of obedience as the consequence of faith, and since we must never forget the indissoluble unity of the two, we...
01261 – Your Faith will Make You Well
Jesus calls his disciples, giving us authority to heal and sending us out. He doesn't show us how to reliably...make a blind man see, dry every tear, or even drive out all kinds of demons. But he shows us how to enter into a way of life in which the broken and sick...
01260 – Don’t Risk Losing Touch with God
The God of biblical faith is the God who meets us at those moments in which for better or worse we are being most human, most ourselves, and if we lose touch with those moments, if we don’t stop from time to time to notice what is happening to us and around us and...
01247 – Faith: Propositional Truth vs. Personal Experience
When the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that God is dead, he was not making an ontological point. He was making an existential point. He was not announcing that God had died, but that our experience of God had died. This was due, in part, to...
01242 – Knowing God Better
What makes the Bible God's Word isn't its uncanny historical accuracy, as some insist, but the sacred experiences these stories point to, beyond the words themselves. Watching these ancient pilgrims work through their faith, even wrestling with how they did that,...
01236 – Dangers of Sociopolitical-Economic Power
Samuel understands well that people of faith cannot withdraw from public questions. He understands well that every decision about God brings along with it an implicit decision about sociopolitical-economic power. This narrative concerns the attractiveness and danger...
01210 – Faith vs. Beliefs
Faith is far more than the sum total of beliefs. Beliefs are merely pointers; faith is profound trust in the actuality to which beliefs point. The Creed mentions beliefs, but it is a statement of faith, not of beliefs. There are many beliefs, but there is ultimately...
01206 – Watching & Discussing–but No Action
An analogy: You are responsible for fifty teenagers. So you gather them together and put them in the parish hall and tell them to dance. You go for a cup of coffee. You return and witness this scene, a typical one: four or five girls dancing in the middle of the hall,...