Our lives are meant to inspire with (or inhale) the breath of God, the glory of his presence, the brilliance and beauty of his creation, and to expire (or exhale) an echo of wonder—an “amen.” It shoul...
God is the author of the physical world, and in his wisdom, he designed physical realities to convey spiritual mysteries. “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God,” as C. S. Lewis insist...
The gospel is therefore not just the ABCs of the Christian life, but the A to Z of the Christian life. Our problems arise largely because we don’t continually return to the gospel to work it in and li...
Surprisingly enough, it was in the process of staying faithful to the spiritual journey that I first began to face my profound ambivalence about life in a body. At the ripe old age of thirty, I could ...
Put another way, what you think about God will shape your destiny in life. If you think of God as homophobic, racist, and mad at the world, this distorted vision of reality will shape you into a relig...
Christians are often accused of two wrong-headed views of the body. One is that we ignore the body in favor of a disembodied, spirits-floating-on-clouds spirituality. The other is that we are obsessed...
Now, technology is everywhere. I don’t mean just glowing screens and digital devices; I mean the whole apparatus of “easy everywhere” that has come into existence in just over the span of one human li...
Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will percei...
In this excerpt, author David Zahl challenges the common belief that religion is “in decline.” He argues that while Westerners, particularly younger generations, may be distancing themselves from the ...
These people always find God in the sunsets. And in walks on the beach. Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the mountains, what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops,...
In our modern materialistic world, it is easy to lose sight of that sense of longing. In her wonderful collection of essays Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard speaks about that growing void...
A number of years ago I was discipling a young man who had recently been released from the state’s juvenile detention center. As a teenager he had been hooked on drugs, and he had resorted to stealing...
Matthew 6:28-29, 1 Peter 3:3-4, Proverbs 31:30, Romans 1:25
Recently, when I was in London, I went to the National Gallery. It was a weekday, but it was still crowded with people wearing headsets, staring at famous paintings, listening to a narrator explain th...
In 1889, the French novelist Paul Bourget penned The Disciple , where he depicted the life of a renowned philosopher and psychologist, whose existence was marked by a seemingly monotonous routine...
In this short (and humorous) excerpt, author David Zahl shares a definition of the secular: Perhaps secular warrants its own explanation, though. My most immediate association comes from the belov...
Psalm 104:24-25, Matthew 6:25-34, Job 38:41, James 1:5, Romans 1:20, Psalm 19:1-4, Job 12:7-10
O Great Spirit, whose breath gives life to the world, and whose voice is heard in the soft breeze; We need your strength and wisdom. Cause us to walk in beauty. Give us the eyes ever to behold the red...
I recently visited a missions school at a large church in Waco, Texas, and decided to try a similar test in a class-sized proportion. “Tell me,” I said to the group, “what is the gospel?” A young lady...
After finishing a major project, have you ever stood back, taken in what you have accomplished, and said to yourself, “That’s pretty good”? I’ll admit that I have on numerous occasions, especially aft...
This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived from this…. We all like astonishing tales because they to...
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...
Pastor: Father God, we live in a world where good news is rare. Help us always to remember the Good News of Your Son, who by His life, death, and resurrection brought into the world the hope of a ne...
Medical doctor Paul Brand, who is best known for discovering the cause of leprosy and developing a treatment for it, reflects on the nature and design of the universe. The more I delve into natural l...
J.M. Montgomery’s novel Emily of New Moon has a passage that conveys the attractive and terrifying aspects of the mystery of God: It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, th...
Proverbs 29:25, Acts 4:13, John 15:18-19, 2 Timothy 1:7-8, Colossians 4:5-6, Matthew 5:14-16, Romans 1:16
Why is it so intimidating to talk about Jesus in contemporary western culture? One obvious reason might lie in the ubiquitous negative portrayals of Christians in mainstream media. Sam Chan makes this...
In an article entitled, What the New Atheists Don’t See , the British author Theodore Dalrymple shares his honest struggles with atheism. The subtitle of his article is fascinating, “To regret re...