ephesians on Misunderstanding

A traveler, between flights at an airport, went to a lounge and bought a small package of cookies. Then she sat down and began reading a newspaper. Gradually, she became aware of a rustling noise. Fro...

An emissary from a learned society came to invite the eminent scientist Louie Agassiz to address its members. Agassiz refused on the grounds that lectures of this sort took up too much time that shoul...

The Transitive Property of Welcoming In elementary school math you learn various basic principles of working with numbers…the commutative property, the associative property, the distributive property...

preaching commentary The Transitive Property of Welcoming In elementary school math you learn various basic principles of working with numbers…the commutative property, the associative property, th...

The point of discourse is to learn with and from one another. I used to tell my students that at least 20 percent of what I was telling them was wrong, but I didn't know which 20 percent it was: I...

Many promising reconciliations have broken down because, while both parties came prepared to forgive, neither party came prepared to be forgiven.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity..

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest...

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

I once had the opportunity to speak briefly to a large Mormon audience at the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. I told them that I feel badly about the fact that we evangelicals often tell Mormons what th...

In the mid-1980s, I helped facilitate a series of conferences between top Soviet and American policy advisers on the question of how to prevent a nuclear war. The times were tense and the accusations ...

In their excellent book Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien share the importance of recognizing the lens through which see the world: We speak as insi...

David Seamands (1922-2006) was an author, scholar, evangelical renewal leader and counselor. In an article for Christianity Today , he shares his earnest experience of many of his patients who we...

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

Love is an agreement on the part of two people to overestimate each other.

If I withhold mercy, I have lost touch with the gospel. I have lost touch with God’s undeserved kindness and pardon.

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

In the New Testament sin is not merely an individual, privatized transgression of a moral standard (sins is typically used for specific transgressions). It is far more radical than that. Sin is a mist...

Forgiveness doesn’t mean “I didn’t really mind” or “it didn’t really matter.” I did mind and it did matter, otherwise there wouldn’t be anything to forgive at all, merely something to adjust my attitu...

Two kinds of blindness are easily combined so that those who do not see really appear to see what is not.

If we minimize grace, the world sees no hope for salvation. If we minimize truth, the world sees no need for salvation.

Holy and merciful God, we confess to you and to one another, and in the company of the communion of saints, that we have sinned by our own fault, in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and ...

Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans and myself from the community of sinners.

All that I ever really needed to know about uncivil language I learned in the fifth grade. At a small Dutch Calvinist school in a New Jersey city, I was playing with other students just before classes...

The essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for Man.

If we minimize grace, the world sees no hope for salvation. If we minimize truth, the world sees no need for salvation.

A conversation in 1784 between Charles Simeon (a Calvinist and believer in unconditional predestination) and John Wesley (a follower of Arminius, who denied unconditional predestination) can help us u...

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.

In 1988, I (Randy) moved with my wife and two sons (ages two and eight weeks) from Texas to Sulawesi, an island north of Australia and south of the Philippines. We served as missionaries to a cluster ...

Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.