analogies on Purification

In 2010, an oil rig named “Deepwater Horizon” suffered a catastrophic failure. Due to improper installation of the cement seal, a malfunctioning blowout preventer, and cost-cutting decisions by corpor...

Fire is a purifying force. My mom, a nurse, taught us this principle when we were very young. She used a needle on our skin to remove a thorn or lance a sore. She did so after she had twirled the shar...

Refiner’s fires are used on precious metals, not for mundane elements. The refiner must hold the metal in the hottest part of the fire in order to burn off all the impurities, thus retrieving a pure...

In Isaiah 43:25, God says, “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.” Here God uses two absolute terms to assure us of the complete removal...

To help us in our confession we may want to picture a path littered with many rocks. Some are small pebbles, others are quite large, and still others are almost completely buried so that we cannot kno...

Spiritual nourishment cannot be seen purely in our outward behavior. The process of sanctification is a deeply internal process. Outside growth is merely a symptom, and acting better does not mean our...

Think of an ancient icon of Christ. Imagine that a thousand-year-old Christ Pantocrator painted on a wooden panel is discovered in some forgotten monastery. The image of Christ is there, but it’s cove...

There’s a sermon by the great Tony Evans in which he uses an illustration involving dishes to make sense of the term “holy.” In his home, and in most homes really, there are two types of dishes. There...

For us, Jesus instituted two ongoing signs to confirm our confidence in the gospel of his grace, the first of which is baptism. Though simpler and less obviously supernatural than the ten plagues on E...

In India, there are street ear cleaners. Standing in line at the theater, you might be approached by such a peddler promising to give your ears a good cleaning.

Pilgrimage is a marinating process. The Bible is bursting with people who traveled to places of retreat where God seasoned and tenderized them, preparing them to take the next step of the journey. Mos...

Since Jesus isn’t attached to the same things we are, he can take the God-view, which is about more than redeeming our individual lives. God means to redeem the world, which is going to require some m...

In this excerpt from a sermon on the Lord’s Supper delivered by Augustine of Hippo to a group of Catechumens, (a Christian believer preparing for Baptism) the great bishop compares the process in whic...

Seal. You know the verb. You twist a jar lid to seal the pickles. You lick an envelope to seal the letter. You notarize the contract to seal the deal. Sealing declares ownership and secures contents. ...

How good it is to center down! To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by! The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic; Our spirits resound with clashing, with noisy silences, While some...

There once was a town high in the Alps that straddled the banks of a beautiful stream. The stream was fed by springs that were old as the earth and deep as the sea.  The water was clear like crysta...

The prayerful cultivation of simplicity is every Christian’s business. And as it is increasingly experienced, its untold value is increasingly seen. May we apply its principles to our life, as we seek...

Curiously enough, it is a fear of how grace will change and improve them that keeps many souls away from God. They want God to take them as they are and let them stay that way. They want Him to take a...

Humanity is thirsty for God, but we drink from cups that can hold no water. We draw well water and find that we are thirstier after we drink our fill. It is the water of self-hatred and rejection. It ...

God stretches our faith in order to prepare us to receive his promises. That often requires painful rewiring. We need updating, just as an old house may need rewiring. The old electrical wires might b...

Religion is the business of appeasing gods. In the old days, you’d take some unfortunate animal to a temple, give it to a priest, and the priest would dispatch of it for you before the watchful eyes o...

The human soul is like a fine wine that needs to ferment in various barrels as it ages and mellows. The wisdom for this is written everywhere, in nature, in scripture, in spiritual traditions, and in ...

[The] Puritans made good use of the Latin phrase omnis vita gustu ducitur -every life is led along by its tastes. They knew that each creature is piloted by an inner yearning for its favorite food. E...

The recognition of humanity's flawed nature is not exclusive to Christianity. Aristotle, in his work Ethics , compares human nature to a warped piece of wood. To rectify this warp, a skilled ...

When the Hebrews, recently enslaved but now free, were gathered at Sinai to begin their formation as a free people, God spoke the words that defined them over against their four centuries of slavery i...

We may not see tangible evidence of where we are going, what God is doing, or how we are growing, but wintering is essential preparation for life to flourish. Uncertainty, like winter, clears the land...

This is how adoption works—like a sacrament, that visible sign of an inner grace. It’s a thin place where we see that we are different and yet not entirely foreign to one another. We are relatives not...

In this short excerpt, the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass describes the tension between faith in Christ and faith in a form of Christianity willing to enslave an entire race of peopl...

There’s a story about a traveler making his way with a guide through the jungles of Burma. They came to a shallow but wide river and waded through it to the other side. When the traveler came out of t...

If you think of your identity and heart as an engine, you could say there is a kind of fuel that powers it cleanly and efficiently—and a kind of fuel that is not only polluting but also destroys the e...