No matter how corrupt, greedy and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religions and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful… Let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS...
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...
We can learn a great deal about worship by looking at the earliest Christians, for the culture that surrounded them was in many ways similar to ours in twenty-first century North America. Then and now the population is highly pluralistic, with the people’s...
Modern-day individualism has diminished and diluted the communal emphasis in Scripture. Piety has become compartmentalized, relegated to a private personal pocket of life. The result is a religious consumerism which describes worship as “attending the church of your...
Worship in truth is worship that arises out of an actual encounter with God, a response to the experience of knowing God’s real presence and activity in our daily lives. This has nothing to do with sentiment, thinking religious thoughts or having aesthetic experiences...
Jesus was this kind of giver. He is the greatest sign to us that life need not be dreary, need not be saved, but can be, must be, entirely spent. It is fear that makes us hold on to life or to what represents life’s meaning for us. The cross marked the place in...
Many times before, Jesus had turned down the chance to declare himself… Only on this day, first before the religious establishment and then before the political, only when his claims would seem the height of absurdity, did he admit to who he was. “The Son of God,” he...
Our world is not colored by race, color, gender, or religion. Our world is divided into wise people and fools. And fools divide themselves by race, color, gender, or religion.
It is a help to think of the life and death of Jesus as sacrifice, but the word needs to be used with care. In the world of religion a sacrifice is either an offering to the ultimately holy or the giving up of something in devotion to the holy. The two ideas can blend...
Religion gives us the structures that weld the habits and disciplines of the soul into one integrated whole. Those same structures can also, however, smother the very spirit they intend to shape. We can get caught in the structures and the forms that are the basilica...