romans from 2 corinthians 3

One saint used to say that she was the type of woman who advances more rapidly when she is drawn by love than when driven by fear. She was perceptive enough to know that we are all that type of person...

The new life is not a matter of mere moral reformation, but of spiritual transformation.

Addiction goes deeper than obsession and compulsion. It is worship. It is giving my heart and soul over to something that I believe will ease my pain and provide an outlet for my fury at being out of ...

Gracious God, you have called us to be light in a dark world, and we have remained hidden. Thinking of ourselves first, we have withheld courage and compassion. Merciful God, hear our confessions and ...

God, we come with hesitant steps and uncertain motives to sweep out the corners where sin has accumulated, and uncover the ways we have strayed from Your truth. Expose the empty and barren places wher...

Creator Spirit, by whose aid The world's foundations first were laid, Come, visit every pious mind; Come, pour thy joys on humankind; From sin and sorrow set us free, And make thy temples worthy t...

God is willing to walk the earth again incarnate in us.

In his book Flesh: Bringing the Incarnation Down to Earth , Hugh Halter opens with an unlikely scenario: taking his teenage daughter to get her first tattoo. While watching his daughter get “inked...

Our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and “trying to carry it out. The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself....

Garry Smalley was a Christian counselor and prolific author. He was known for one particular illustration about the intrinsic value each of us has as children of God. Speaking at a large event, he ask...

Its [Romans] message is not that ‘man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains’, as Rousseau put it at the beginning of The Social Contract (1762); it is rather that human beings are born in sin ...

Charles Darwin, known for his theory of natural selection, noticed that his later life included a “loss of happiness.” While he never acknowledged that it might have been related to his changing world...

It is no good giving me a play like Hamlet or King Lear, and telling me to write a new play just like it. Shakespeare could do it; I can’t. And it is no good showing me a life like the life of Jesus a...

[Jonathan] Sacks comments on this passage, tying it back to his study of adaptive leadership concepts. In the first occasion, Moses was faced with a technical challenge: the people needed food. On the...

The Christian’s life in all its aspects—intellectual and ethical, devotional and relational, upsurging in worship and outgoing in witness—is supernatural; only the Spirit can initiate and sustain it.

It is as if the Spirit stands behind us, throwing light over our shoulder, on Jesus, who stands facing us. The Spirit’s message is never, “Look at me; listen to me; come to me; get to know me,” but al...

The Christian religion begins in a New Birth in the power of the Spirit. It is developed under His guidance, and sustained by His presence; but ignoring the Spirit, it becomes a matter of education an...

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...

When God’s grace changes our status from rebel to redeemed, we are empowered by his Spirit to obey him. We are transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:2) into his likeness (2 Cor. 3:18). Joy...

The needed change within us is God's work, not ours. The demand is for an inside job, and only God can work from the inside. We cannot attain or earn this righteousness of the kingdom of God: it i...

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to r...

Beauty awakens the soul to act.

Our godlike beauty is hidden beneath curtains of shame.