Let me describe what Pentecost wasn't like, all right? Picture all those believers meeting together. Suddenly there's the sound of a mighty rushing wind, and it fills all the house where they were sitting. "Great! This is wonderful!" they cry. "Quick! Shut the...
When Jesus talks about this Oneness, he is not speaking in an Eastern sense about an equivalency of being, such that I am in and of myself divine. What he more has in mind is a complete, mutual indwelling: I am in God, God is in you, you are in God, we are in each...
A man must have a sense of being cared for, of not being alone and stranded in the universe. All of us want the assurance of not being deserted by life nor deserted in life. Faith teaches us that God is--that He is the fact of life from which all other things take...
For Jesus, compassion was more than a quality of God and an individual virtue [though it was indeed that]: it was a social paradigm, the core value for life in the community. To put it boldly: Jesus was political. He directly and repeatedly challenged the dominant...
Every act of worship should be understood as part of the Church's offering to God. "Any action that does not meet with that qualification does not deserve to be a part of a worship experience." [C. Weldon Gaddy, The Gift of Worship] All the music, from prelude to...
The goal of God's act of grace in Christ is therefore unity among his creatures, a unity which, as this whole discussion has shown, is to become reality in the present in the community of those who acknowledge God's gracious lordship in Christ. If the universal scope...
I am absolutely amazed that Joseph is the first person in the New Testament who learned how to read the Bible. Like Joseph, we are to read it through the spectacles of the grace and the goodness and the love of God. If in reading the Bible you find justification for...
What is the purpose of a choir? It's not to perform difficult music before a silent and intimidated (or irritated) congregation. It's not there to impress the faithful. It's there to encourage the faithful to find their voices to praise God in his holiness. It is...
I feel certain that God was there in lower Manhattan on 9/11, with every soul, in the midst of that sheer terror and raw evil. This gives me comfort. If the thought of finding God in such horrendous circumstances seems strange, perhaps it is because we are out of...
Is your preferred style of corporate worship quiet and contemplative? Loud and raucous? Centered on preaching? Centered on communion? Prayer focused? Service focused? Other? Wonderful. Don't let anyone shame you for how God made you to worship Jesus through the...