When the Bible describes the word of God as "sharper than a two-edged sword," perhaps we should envision this probing and incisive word of truth more as a surgical scalpel or a gamma knife capable of going after our deepest sin, rather than using the Bible as a dagger...
God,Grant that I may pass through the coming year with a faithful heart. There will be much to test me and make weak my strength before the year ends.In my confusion I shall often say the word that is not true and do the thing of which I am ashamed. There will be...
Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse,...
The problem with accepting truth as it comes to us rather than truth as we divine it for ourselves is that it's not worth dying for--and we don't. It becomes a patina of ideas inside of which we live our lives without passion, without care. This kind of faith happens...
Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: "These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious...
If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.
When our story is told a century from now--and it will be--how much of the American church ran after idols and delusions, false christs, and conspiracies? History will not only fault the pastors for not confronting us with the truth, but the congregations who forbade...
The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie.
I am a pastor. My work has to do with God and souls--intense mysteries that no one has ever seen at any time....I don't want to end up a bureaucrat in the time-management business for God or a librarian cataloguing timeless truths. Salvation is kicking in the womb of...
We are, on this night, at the pivot point of the Jesus story. And it turns out that on this night we are at the pivot point of the story of the world. Everything depends on the outcome of the trial of Jesus before Pilate. It is a trial we get to remember tonight. It...