Riches, both material and spiritual, can choke you if you do not use them fairly. For not even God can put anything in a heart that is already full. One day there springs up the desire for money and for all that money can provide--the superfluous, luxury in eating,...
I am sometimes amazed, even alarmed, at the extent to which people judge ministers by their preaching, and preaching by its rhetoric. To do so is to make the entirely spurious but nearly universal assumption that God is better served by a poet than by an accountant....
It is something we all have experience with--the dust of our lives. We miss the mark of God's best for us when we believe the illusion that our dustiness is only in part of us. Our lives are not...as shiny clean as we like to think they are. Our lives are not free of...
The inherent legalism of the Western Church trains our eyes on Jesus' suffering as the judgment of God upon our sin & virtually blinds us to the more obvious point that Jesus suffered from the wickedness of humanity. It was the human race, not the Father, who...
Jesus beatifies mourning, not moping. He does not counsel the long face. He does, however, bless real sadness, a state that can as easily coexist with an outwardly happy life as do all the other normal contradictions of living. (The deepest joy may reside in persons...
The idea that God's providence means that he looks after those who serve him by a special use of his power in terms of favoritism is an immoral idea and insulting to both man and God. No true Christian wants to opt out of the trials that beset others, and no worthy...
Today, vast stress is laid on the thought that God is personal, but this truth is so stated as to leave the impression that God is a person of the same sort as we are--weak, inadequate, ineffective, a little pathetic. But this is not the God of the Bible! Our personal...
The good news of the gospel is that God has time for us.
When I pray for another person, I am praying for God to open my eyes so that I can see that person as God does, and then enter into the stream of love that God already directs toward that person. from Prayer: Does it Make a Difference?
Many of us are tempted to think that if we suffer, the only important thing is to be relieved of our pain. We want to flee it at all costs. But when we learn to move through suffering, rather than to avoid it, then we greet it differently. We become willing to let it...