background from matthew 16

In the 1800s, a group of people were exploring just outside the ancient walls of Jerusalem, near the Damascus Gate, when they came across a hole in the ground. Curious, they began to dig—and uncovered...

In this short excerpt, Father Roderick Strange speaks to those who want to write off the church. It is written primarily to a Roman Catholic audience, but it relates quite well to Protestants as well:...

[M]ost Christians attach their convictions to Christ personally. In other words, we form our convictions in order to please Jesus, not ourselves. Convictions do not express what we think or feel or li...

What is the place of the church in relation to God’s mission? Pastor John Stott offers some crucial thoughts, For the church lies at the very center of the eternal purposes of God. It is not a div...

The following advice on success, written by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, is extremely different from what we are used to (at least in the West,) where success is often seen as an absolute good. ...

How do you define what it means to “make a sacrifice?” We say we sacrifice for our family, or sacrifice for our careers. We speak of Jesus sacrificing himself so that we can experience eternal life. A...

In her excellent book on following Jesus in the suburbs, Ashley Hales describes one of the ways in which our discipleship has been influenced by modern secular trends such as the desire for self-actua...

Have you ever seen an episode of the A&E TV show Hoarders? It’s a show about perfectly normal-looking people who live in perfectly normal-looking houses who become overwhelmed by their possessions...

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...

Sometimes our successes can be more devastating than our failures. We fight, strain, and struggle in pursuit of something or someone that looks to be good, and after days or months or years, we obtain...

“I think a defining question for a Christian is: Who was Christ?” He went on to say, And I don’t think you’re let off easily by saying a great thinker or a great philosopher, because actually he went ...

We must continue to affirm the uniqueness and finality of Jesus Christ. For he is unique in his incarnation (the one and only God-man), unique in his atonement (only he has died for the sins of the wo...

There’s Republican Jesus who is against tax increases and activists judges, and for family values and owning firearms. There’s Democrat Jesus who is against Wall Street and Walmart, and for reducing ...

The Gospel is not about choosing to follow advice, it’s about being called to follow a King. Not just someone with the power and authority to tell you what needs to be done—but someone with the power ...

God uses our identity crises to reveal who we are and who he is. Sometimes these crises come out of nowhere. Something devastating happens. Someone close to us dies. We are diagnosed, or someone we kn...

All crises are judgments of history that call into question an existing state of affairs. They sift and sort the character and condition of a nation and its capacity to respond. The deeper the crisis,...

First, we get our calling wrong when we imagine that God needs us, to be the hero of our own story, rather than Christ. Second, we routinely misdiagnose the problem of our world, underestimating estim...