ephesians on Religions

By many accounts the first Muslim in America was Estevancio of Azamor, a Moroccan guide for a Spanish expedition in 1528 that landed in Florida. A couple of centuries later, as many as a third of the ...

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...

[For Christians] the entire religion shop has been closed, boarded up, and forgotten. The church is not in the religion business. It never has been and it never will be, in spite of all the ecclesiast...

In the book Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas, U2’s Bono does a great job describing God’s grace. After describing how the concept of karma is central to many religions, Bono explains how karm...

Context— Looking Ahead The next 2 weeks (Week 5 – 4:17-5:2; and Week 6 – 5:3-21) move into more of the practical application of what we’ve seen thus far in Ephesians. The week after that (Week 7 – ...

Context— Looking Ahead The next 2 weeks (Week 5 – 4:17-5:2; and Week 6 – 5:3-21) move into more of the practical application of what we’ve seen thus far in Ephesians. The week after that (Week 7 – ...

For some, faith begins with a hard shell, a rigid set of answers and platitudes that keep them safe but eventually prevent them from growing into who they could be. The system that was initially prote...

To tell someone what you believe may be to answer the wrong question—better to say, instead, what the church believes, better to use the language the church has bequeathed to us to shape our experienc...

About 2 out of 3 American adults who regularly attend church or other religious services say they go for their kids.

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...

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

That which distinguishes Christianity has not been stolen. For what makes Christianity absolutely distinct is the identity of our God. Which God we worship: that is the article of faith that stands be...

There was what an Orthodox Hasidic rabbi had said on a flight westward. He’d put his prayer shawl in the overhead compartment and sat down, sweeping aside the tassels dangling from his pockets. And so...

In his insightful book, Delighting in the Trinity , Michael Reeves shares an interesting point of connection between the Protestant understanding of sola grati discovered by Francis Xavier during...

I find your lack of faith—disturbing.

Faith is a how and, more specifically, a way of living in light of an event.

Churches are not the kingdom of God, but are primary and inevitable expressions, outposts, and instrumentalities of the presence of the kingdom among us.

Only faith survives; faith which is not a work, not even a negative work; not an achievement, not even the achievement of humility. . . . Faith is the ground, the new order, the light. . . . Faith is ...

Part of the problem was that the atheist movement had primarily rallied around what it was against —religion. Consequently, it had struck a negative tone ever since its inception. Aware of this, ...

It is helpful to understand the call of God in three distinct ways. First, there is the call to be a Christian. The God of creation invites us to respond to his love. This call comes through Jesus, wh...

We know the Incarnation mysteriously unites all of humankind to God and one another, but so often the lines of Christianity feel like they do nothing but divide us.

Culture is like gravity. We never talk about it, except in physics classes. We don’t include gravity in our weekly planning processes. No one gets up thinking about how gravity will affect their day. ...

Cultural diversity was built into the Christian faith…in Acts 15, which declared that the new gentile Christians didn’t have to enter Jewish culture…. The converts had to work out…a Hellenistic way of...

Too often we are given a choice—emotions or faith and belief. Yet as Dan Allender and Tremper Longman observe,  Emotion links our internal and external worlds. To be aware of what we feel can open ...

Now, in our lifetime, scientists are finding ever newer evidence for what some religious people called presence in the very organizing energy of the universe—from fractals, to holograms, to electro-ma...

Far too many people, especially within evangelicalism, think that the individual is all that matters, and that the corporate dimension is a distraction or diversion. Of course Christianity is deeply p...

In a quiet hospital room in North Carolina, an eager young doctor with a bright future evaluates his elderly patient with not much future left at all. She has a terminal heart condition, inoperable. A...

Despite what now appears to me to be the overwhelmingly obvious connections between spirituality and sexuality, when I first came to faith and went to church, I had the sneaking suspicion that God had...

Faith’s only function is to receive what grace offers.

Challenges to holiness without mention of grace force a human-centered religion. After all, people cannot do what they are told to do apart from Christ’s grace. That’s John 15:5, right? “Apart from me...