Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness and life to everything. Fine music is the essence of order and leads to all that is just and good, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless...
Popular music is engineered by people in the entertainment industry, and sales are the arbiter of success (hence the enormous sums earned by the writers of often-played commercials)… At the other end of the power spectrum is great religious music. Here the texts deal...
John Newton, a great English singer and powerful preacher of the gospel, was at one time in his life perfectly content with a secondhand religion and the external performance of religious duties. Aboard his slave ship on Sunday he faithfully read the prescribed...
Whether rich or poor, male or female…our stories are all stories of searching. We search for a good self to be and for good work to do. We search to become human in a world that tempts us always to be less than human or looks to us to be more. We search to love and to...
At the end of life, what really matters is not what we bought but what we built; not what we got but what we shared; not our competence but our character; and not our success, but our significance. Live a life that matters. Live a life of love.
Since worship is focusing on and responding to God, regardless of what else we are doing we are not worshiping if we are not thinking about God. You may be listening to a sermon, but without thinking of how God’s truth applies to your life and affects your...
I have become convinced that Christianity is fundamentally an experience in losing the lives of our dreams in order to receive the lives that Jesus died to give us. from When God Interrupts: Finding New Life through Unwanted Change
Worship celebrates God’s saving deed in Jesus Christ. This kind of worship is not a goal-driven worship, but a Christ-driven worship. And when Christ is the center of worship, all the goals of worship are achieved: Christ-centered worship educates, evangelizes, heals,...
Whole armies of Christians go to church, seeking a feel-good religious experience… God is the goal of life. Emotion may be the result of our meeting with God, but it is never the goal of it. from Until He Comes
All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for...