I believe firmly that the moment our hearts are emptied of pride and selfishness and ambition and everything that is contrary to God’s law, the Holy Spirit will fill every corner of our hearts. But if we are full of pride and conceit and ambition and the world, there...
It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another’s city? How do you...
Until you become thankful, you will never find joy. Being thankful is not telling God you appreciate the fact that your life is not in shambles. If that is the basis of your gratitude you are on slippery ground. Every day of your life you face the possibility that a...
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...
Religious liberty is the nursing mother of all liberty. Without it all other forms of liberty must soon wither and die. The Baptists grasped this conception of liberty in its full-orbed glory, from the very beginning. Their contention has been, is now, and must ever...
There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad ones are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover’s quarrel with their country, a reflection of God’s lover’s quarrel with all the world. from Credo
If the church is to flourish, we cannot build our religious lives around a gospel of fear, or a gospel of reward for our meanness. The Christian faith is not about being afraid of God. Fear may get us to submit but fear always leads to anger and resentment and...
If happiness is what we feel when we think we’ve got what we want, then joy is what we feel when we discover we already have what we most need. Joy is still present when life is hard. Christ comes for grieving people with broken homes and broken hearts. Christmas is...
The process of being conformed to the image of Christ takes place primarily at the points of our unlikeness to Christ’s image. God meets us there, in grace, offering us the forgiveness, the cleansing, the liberation, the healing we need to begin the journey toward our...
Gratitude keeps us clear that not only do our gifts and our challenges come from God, but that our gifts and challenges are essentially one and the same… Without gratitude, our enjoyment of the world shrinks into cramped self-indulgence and the unscratchable itch of...