colossians on Conversion

Though conversion may be pinpointed to a moment, salvation is a process that continues over a lifetime. I am still being saved from old ways of thinking and behaving and am coming to new understanding...

There are few Christian authors more respected than C. S. Lewis. After his conversion to Christ at age 33, he would spend the rest of his life writing iconic Christian works. However, his relationship...

In his seminal work, The Cross of Christ , British pastor and author John Stott describes the unique, upside-down kingdom instituted on the cross: ‘Irresistible’ is the very word an Iranian stude...

The word eccentric comes from a combination of the Greek terms ex (out of) and kentron (center). When combined, ekkentros means “out of center.” The term gained currency in the late Middle Ages, when ...

Almighty God, by our baptism into the death and resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ, you turn us from the old life of sin:Grant that we, being reborn to new life in him, may live in righteousness a...

Relational congruence is the ability to be fundamentally the same person with the same values in every relationship, in every circumstance and especially amidst crisis. It is the internal capacity to ...

You don’t turn from sin to get saved. You get saved to turn from sin.

All these changes did the Merciful One effect: Stripping of His glory and putting on a body; For He had devised a way to reclothe Adam, In that glory which Adam had stripped off.

The Incarnation [and I might add Communion] remains a scandal to anyone who wants religion to be a purely spiritual matter, an etherized, bloodless bliss.

Transcendent God, you are the creator of time, You exist inside, outside, and around time and space. In your immeasurable power, you created and ordered the universe. Amazingly, you limited yourself b...

“It would be nice and fairly nearly true, to say that ‘from that time forth, Eustace was a different boy.’ To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still ma...

Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.

I learned about incarnation when I kept a salt-water aquarium. Management of a marine aquarium, I discovered, is no easy task. I had to run a portable chemical laboratory to monitor the nitrate levels...

[If] Christ is not all to you he is nothing to you. He will never go into partnership as a part Savior of men. If he be something he must be everything, and if he be not everything he is nothing to yo...

Eternal God, we praise You for stepping out of eternity to enter this world through Your Son, Jesus. In so doing, You gave us the perfect example for Christian life. You gave of Yourself so that other...

Every cross adorning a church is in itself a sermon—a sermon proclaiming that if Christ can transform the Roman instrument of execution into a thing of beauty, there is hope that in Christ all things ...

What Paul does is transform the master-slave relationship by insisting that both masters and slaves have the same heavenly Lord and are accountable to him. The emphasis is on mutual responsibility und...

C.S. Lewis on the Incarnation: We catch sight of a new key principle—the power of the Higher, just in so far as it is truly Higher, to come down, the power of the greater to include the less. . . . ...

A family from a remote area was making their first visit to a big city. They checked in to a grand hotel and stood in amazement at the impressive sight. Leaving the reception desk they came to the ele...

Faith makes all things possible. Love makes all things easy.

A businessman moved over slightly as a young man crowded into the airplane seat next to him. As they both fastened their seat belts, the businessman good-naturedly asked whether the young man was trav...

Long since on Mars and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and both from fact was purely terrestrial-was part and parce...

“It seems, then,” said Tirian, smiling himself, “that the Stable seen from within and the Stable seen from without are two different places.” “Yes,” said the Lord Digory. “Its inside is bigger than it...

To reach people we must appreciate and adapt to their culture, but we must also challenge and confront it. This is based on the biblical teaching that all cultures have God's grace and natural rev...

A mind is more like a pile of millions of little rocks than a single big boulder. To change a mind, we need to carry thousands of little rocks from one pile to another, one at a time. This is because ...

Hope orients all thought, action, and relationships to God’s ultimate redemption of the creation and to the ultimate communion with the triune God...hope is the steady orientation to God’s making all ...

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Salvation in the New Testament is consistently portrayed not as escape from creation but as the redemption and transformation of creation.

My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.