philippians on Picturing God

My friend and colleague Keas Keasler, who teaches a class on spiritual formation, recently asked the class to close their eyes and picture God. After a few moments he had them open their eyes and, if ...

Origen, in the third century, had a great analogy. He told of a village with a huge statue—so immense you couldn’t see exactly what it was supposed to represent. Finally, someone miniaturized the stat...

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...

There is thus no God behind the back of Jesus Christ but only this God whose face we see in the face of the Lord Jesus. There is no deus absconditus , no dark inscrutable God, no arbitrary Deity ...

He who wraps the heavens in clouds wrapped round himself a towel. He who pours the water into the rivers and pools tipped... water into a basin. And he before whom every knee bends in heaven and on ea...

Imagine for a moment becoming a baby again. Imagine giving up language and muscle coordination. Imagine losing the ability to eat solid food and control your bladder. God as a fetus! Or imagine yourse...

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. . . . ...

The last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned them dry as dust, who have...

The Cave One of the most famous passages in Plato's Republic is his "Allegory of the Cave," which is found at the beginning of book seven . Socrates imagines the human condition al...

Jesus, you are our peace You proclaim it You create it You bring us near Without you there is No safety No belonging No nurturing No identity rooted beyond this dust Without you we are Anchorless St...

How beautiful you appear to the angels, Lord Jesus, in the form of God, eternal, begotten before the daystar amid the splendors of heaven, “the radiant light of God’s glory and the perfect copy of his...

God could have chosen any method to save us, but he used the cross. The cross is our spiritual centerpiece, the sign of our soul’s emancipation. However, the pre-Christian cross might offer a sliver ...

It can be great fun to put up a tent in your backyard to play in or sleep in. Imagine what it would be like for someone else to put up a tent in your backyard and begin living there—right in your back...

In the Christian view, the ultimate evidence for the existence of God is Jesus Christ. If there is a God, we characters in his play have to hope that he put some information about himself in the play....

Gracious God, You have called us out of darkness and into the light of Your love. You have redeemed us and made us whole in order to set us free from bondage. The challenge You place before us is to d...

In this beautiful poem by the English Divine John Donne, our nature as both redeemed and still sinful is eloquently described: We think that Paradise and Calvary, Christ’s Cross and Adam’s Tree, ...

It is true that he [Christ] has awful majesty; he is the great God, and is infinitely high above you; but there is this to encourage and embolden the poor sinner, that Christ is a man as well as God; ...

He by whom all things were made was made one of all things. The Son of God by the Father without a mother became the Son of man by a mother without a father. The Word Who is God before all time became...

King Jesus, We confess that we are quick to put our hope in places other than You. We are often more driven by our fears than by our faith in You and Your Kingdom. We place our trust in health, jobs, ...

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

It is true that he [Christ] has awful majesty; he is the great God, and is infinitely high above you; but there is this to encourage and embolden the poor sinner, that Christ is a man as well as God; ...

In their excellent book, Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the foundation of life as being spiritual in nature. This means we are constantly be “form...

Context of Galatians I still remember my intro to New Testament class in college and the professor discussing Paul’s letter to the Galatians. All of Paul’s other letters begin with words of adoration...

There are two wonderful Greek words that the early church theologians used to describe the Trinity: kenōsis and perichōrēsis. Kenosis is the act of self-giving for the good of another. It is found in ...

When the Church tries to embody the rule of God in the forms of earthly power it may achieve that power, but it is no longer a sign of the kingdom.

Fruit is always the miraculous, the created; it is never the result of willing, but always a growth. The fruit of the Spirit is a gift of God, and only He can produce it. They who bear it know as litt...

One time a little boy and his father got to tour Europe. During their journey, they visited a magnificent cathedral, where the boy found himself captivated by the vibrant stained glass windows. He cou...

He was created of a mother whom He created. He was carried by hands that He formed. He cried in the manger in wordless infancy, He the Word, without whom all human eloquence is mute.

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...

When the drama of history is over, Jesus Christ will stand alone upon the stage. All the great figures of history—Pharaoh, Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Churchill, Stalin, Johnson, Mao Tse-tung—wi...