The deepest level of worship is praising God in spite of the pain, thanking God during the trials, trusting Him when we're tempted to lose hope, and loving Him when He seems so distant and far away. At my lowest, God is my hope. At my darkest, God is my light. At my...
Temptations, of course, cannot be avoided, but because we cannot prevent the birds from flying over our heads, there is no need that we should let them nest in our hair.
To understand the story, we need to note how Jesus got into the desert in the first place--into this lonely and heart-breaking place where he was to face the hardest challenge he had yet known. Surely it was the devil who took him there. But the story says that Jesus...
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...
There is even a growing tendency in the church to turn Jesus into a consumer item; from bumper stickers to Christian entertainment, we are finding ways to market our Lord. Our entire culture is oriented to hype, and unfortunately the church is becoming increasingly...
There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down,...
The temptations to misread the Bible on our own behalf and to domesticate it for our own purposes are many and dangerous, and in America, devoted as we are to the Bible, we have tried them all. Bibliolatry, the worship of the Bible and the making of it an object of...
At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. The nonviolent resister would contend that in the struggle for human dignity, the oppressed people of the world must not succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter or indulging in hate campaigns. To...
C. S. Lewis observed that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics…allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.
Temptation at its deepest level has nothing to do with key lime pie or chocolate fudge. Jesus' temptation, like ours, is, “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”