philippians on Existence of the Devil

Once, there was a devout woman who prayed every day in her small apartment, expressing her faith loudly and fervently. Her neighbor, an atheist, often overheard her prayers, which drove her nuts. When...

And I was reminded of an event from my father’s childhood: He was in a Sunday school class, listening to his teacher expound on Genesis 1 and a young earth, and asked his teacher how to make sense o...

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....

Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others…but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a ...

Just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil an...

Suffering is not evidence of God’s absence, but of God’s presence, and it is in our experience of being broken that God does his surest and most characteristic salvation work. There is a way to accept...

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 ...

In the story of Jesus and the demon-possessed man in Mark 5:14-20, Jesus gives new life to that man. When the townspeople saw the result of Jesus’ healing – an entirely new man, almost unrecognizable ...

All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. T...

Ronald Rohlheiser begins his excellent book, Our One Great Act of Fidelity , with a story of a young girl. She had awoken from a nightmare, convinced that monsters had invaded her room and were comin...

The essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to ...

Faith makes all evil good to us, and all good better; unbelief makes all good evil, and all evil worse. Faith laughs at the shaking of the spear; unbelief trembles at the shaking of a leaf, unbelief s...

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...

When you turn to Christ, you don't have a repentance apart from Christ, you just have Christ. Therefore, don't seek repentance or faith as such but seek Christ. When you have Christ you have r...

If your salvation does not include living with God in beauty, truth, and goodness, it’s going to be a very dry haul. And so much of our difficulty today for Christians in this world, and for the world...

I believe that it is the paradox between serving a healing God and the persistence of illness and even death that ultimately lies behind most theological debates about divine healing in the Church. ...

Christ descended into Hades so that you and I would not have to. Christ descended to Hades so that we might ascend to heaven. Christ entered the realm of death, the realm of the strong enemy, and came...

Internal conflict is not only dangerous—it can threaten the long-term flourishing of any organization, including the church. According to tradition, during the Battle of Trafalgar, Lord Horatio Nelson...

He, the Life of all, our Lord and Saviour, did not arrange the manner of his own death lest He should seem to be afraid of some other kind. No. He accepted and bore upon the cross a death inflicted by...

In this excerpt, Frederick Buechner shares a meditation on the vulnerability of Jesus’ birth: The child born in the night among beasts. The sweet breath and steaming dung of beasts. And nothing is...

[In the middle of the twentieth century a] young Russian communist went to a meeting one night where he heard a Christian expounding his faith. The communist was angry. How could anyone still believe ...

We all live between two worlds. We are planted here on earth while our hope is in heaven. We are given work to do in temporary soil that, we’re told, has the potential to spring up into unending fruit...

The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they're liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see. We need a kingdom of heaven in Heaven, if only because i...

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...

The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.

What self denial! What self abasement! What self emptying! He, whom no infinitudes can hold, is contained within infant’s age, and infant’s form. Can it be, that the great ‘I AM THAT I AM’ shrinks int...

When I think of the way God allows His servants to suffer, I can’t help but remember the classic story of poor Jack, who was out jogging. As he passed a cliff, he got a little too close to the edge, a...

For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. In one sense, indeed, He was not far from it before, for no part of creation had ever been witho...

Introduction Our text falls within a larger section (Luke 16) in which Jesus deals head-on with questions of money, specifically the need to choose God over mammon (the worship of money), in other wo...

Inexpressible Things This chapter of Paul’s Corinthian correspondence is rich indeed, revealing so much about Paul and his relationship to the Corinthian church, a church which he himself founded. Bu...