The people of God are not merely to mark time, waiting for God to step in and set right all that is wrong. Rather, they are to model the new heaven and new earth, and by so doing awaken longings for what God will someday bring to pass.
Sin is our only hope, because the recognition that something is wrong is the first step toward setting it right again. There is no help for those who admit no need of help. There is no repair for those who insist that nothing is broken, and there is no hope of...
Whenever you see someone who has to be right, you are looking at someone who is spending more time reading about God than praying to him. They have assumed that we are in a relationship with propositions instead of a Person. When we go before the God of the universe,...
What will be the judgment a century hence concerning the lorded works of our favorite composers today? Inasmuch as nearly everything is subject to the changes of time, and—more’s the pity—the fashions of time, only that which is good and true will endure like a rock...
I believe we should consider church music basically to be THEOLOGICAL expression—part of the dialogue between God and worshipers. With few exceptions, music in worship is coupled with important words. For this reason, we should choose literature—for instance, hymns...
Worship is right because God is worthy of it; it is the best of all antidotes to our own self-centeredness, the most effective way to “disinfect us of egotism,” as one writer put it long ago. In true worship we turn the searchlight of our mind and heart upon God and...
It is, of course, impossible to exaggerate the importance of the historicity of what is commonly known as the Resurrection. If, after all His claims and promises, Christ had died and merely lived on as a fragrant memory, He would only be revered as an extremely good...
Perhaps our worship of God in the shadow of the glory of the past occurs because we fasten our attention on heroes of the faith of bygone days. The giants of yesteryear grow bigger each day with the food of our imagination until their size is tremendous. To be sure,...
Most of our conflicts and difficulties come from trying to deal with the spiritual and practical aspects of our life separately instead of realizing them as parts of one whole. If our practical life is centered on our own interests, cluttered up by possessions,...
Yet faith happens in the in-betweens, the interruptions, the thresholds. It happens when I’ve left this room where I was in control, where I had my self-explanation, where I had my ego boundaries, where I had my moral sense of my own rightness and superiority.