1 corinthians on Mistrust

Did you hear about how, after Adam stayed out late a few nights, Eve became suspicious? “You’re running around with another woman— admit it!” she yelled. "What other woman?!” Adam was mystified. ...

Pastor Matt Chandler describes a humorous encounter with his daughter that illustrates the absurdity of assuming we know better than God. Just as a small child couldn’t possibly know better than a par...

We were created to communicate, to speak truth fully to one another, so that we might be members of one another. To be members of one another means we must learn to trust one another. Trust, like trut...

Gracious God, we come before you with humility, recognizing that doubt has led our decisions. We have allowed fear to lead, rather than love. Because of this, we have been unkind to our families, our ...

Faith is not the absence of doubt. Faith is the presence of love.

I am ignorant of His designs, but I will not cease to believe in them because I cannot penetrate them. And I will prefer to doubt my own lights rather than His justice.

All our experience with history should teach us, when we look back, how badly human wisdom is betrayed when it relies on itself

God wants to feed his people. In keeping the one tree from them, God protected Adam and Eve. When they broke table fellowship with God, they suspected that God was withholding something good, that thi...

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

Heavenly Father, we confess that we come to this day of resurrection as imperfect people. Although we may have faith, we also carry doubts and apprehensions. Just as Jesus’s disciples were unsure of h...

Maybe God has given some people belief like a pier, to stand on (and God has given those people’s steadiness to the church, to me, as a reminder, as an aid), and maybe God has given others something e...

The man of pseudo-faith will fight for his verbal creed but refuse flatly to allow himself to get in a predicament where his future must depend upon that creed being true. He always provides himself w...

Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone’s back.

Almighty God, we trust in our own strength, abilities, and resources. We think too highly of what we have to offer this world. The truth is we cannot do anything without your strength and all we have ...

The search for knowledge can go wrong, not as a result of individual, erroneous judgments or of mistakes creeping in at different points, but because of one single mistake at the beginning… Faith does...

Scripture also speaks of “discernment of spirits” and encourages us to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God.” This aspect of discernment helps us to distinguish the real from the phony, ...

I believe though I do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind.

Belief doesn’t create truth. Unbelief doesn’t destroy truth. Christian faith goes beyond reason but not against reason.

If we desire our faith to be strengthened, we should not shrink from opportunities where our faith may be tried, and therefore, through trial, be strengthened.

We may have more disagreements with nonbelievers, but our disagreements with fellow believers are more problematic and more emotionally charged.

In her thought-provoking book, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes the tension in listening to our deepest desires: some of them these desires are integral to our identity, but they a...

Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make — bombs, for instance, or strawberry shortcake — if you make even the tiniest mistake you can find yourself in terrible ...

Context As we read the opening chapters of Mark, it becomes clear that Mark is not primarily interested in telling us things about Jesus but showing Jesus to us. We see Jesus the healer, the exor...

Context As we read the opening chapters of Mark, it becomes clear that Mark is not primarily interested in telling us things about Jesus but showing Jesus to us. We see Jesus the healer, the exor...

One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...

God's will is what you would want for yourself if you knew enough to want it.

’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

Leader: We are people of the resurrection. Witnesses to God’s glorious victory in Jesus Christ, which brings peace and transforms the power structures of this world. But we also know that we live in ...

When we watch cartoons, it is fun to see the way we can so easily allow some of the craziest stuff to just be taken at face value. Movements that don’t follow the laws of physics? Sure. Talking animal...

I wasn’t raised in a Christian family. I only entered the “Christian bubble” of a Southern Baptist youth group in junior high, where I pledged myself to abstinence before marriage at a True Love Waits...