bible and theology on Meaning

Our lives only have meaning as we understand them with respect to obedience to Christ Jesus who is seated at the Father’s right hand. If we lose our focus on Him, then we lose our connection with real...

Burnout is the disease of our age. Time magazine had an editorial way back in the 1980s about “the burnout of just about everybody.” I concluded that the metaphor of burnout was not quite right, parti...

Like me, you may struggle deeply with what it means to live well. We are all seeking to take these scattered moments of meaning and weave them together into a beautiful whole.

What oxygen is to the lungs, such is hope to the meaning of life.

The mystery of the universe, and the meaning of God's world, are shrouded in hopeless obscurity, until we learn to feel that all laws suppose a lawgiver, and that all working involves a Divine ene...

Sin isn’t only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God. Whatever...

In a journal entry by the Danish Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the great existentialist philosopher describes the importance not simply of grasping the truth of the Christian faith, but having the tr...

Psalm 101:3: “I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless.” The term here—worthless—is a compound, literally: without profit. It is “the quality of being useless, good for nothing.” Pg.11...

My question—that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide—was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man…a question without an answer to which one cannot live. It wa...

Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it's to have any meaning in this world - and stop being its ...

The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything is has to face without wavering. If we take this view, life becomes one great romance, a glorious opportunity for seeing marvelous thi...

The other enemy of the soul, meaninglessness…chokes out life with equal vigor. Meaninglessness woos us into spending our one shot at life on insignificant and trivial things. If we are not vigilant, w...

Gracious and loving God, you know the deep inner patterns of my life that keep me from being totally yours. You know the misformed structures of my being that hold me in bondage to something less than...

What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion.

The meaning of creation remains unexplainable so long as the veil covers the eternal Image. This life would be nothing but destiny, this time only sorrow, all love but decay, if the pulse of Being did...

The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering...but in the development of the soul.

Let me first tell you what I mean by the word “blessing.” In Latin, to bless is benedicere. The word “benediction” that is used in many churches means literally: speaking (dictio) well (bene) or sayin...

Morning in Hebrew has the meaning of “penetration.” God’s day is not complete until light shines again, penetrating the darkness and dispersing the shadows.

You could put the meaning of original sin this way: given a choice we would rather sulk than rejoin the party.

In the wake of the violence of the Bolshevik Revolution, a member of the Russian Imperial Diplomatic Corps emigrated with his family to Paris. His teenage son found himself adrift in the sudden shift ...

In the Hebrew lexicon, there are multiple words for love, but one of my favorites is the word dod. Although it is often rendered “love,” dod refers specifically to sexual love and is better translated...

Here, then, is the message of Easter, or at least the beginning of that message. The resurrection of Jesus doesn’t mean, “It’s all right. We’re going to heaven now.” No, the life of heaven has been bo...

We long to see our lives whole and to know that they matter. We wonder whether our many activities might ever come together in a way of life that is good for ourselves and others. Are we really living...

Testament  means “covenant,” an alliance between two partners, an “agreement,” a “promise.” The Old Testament covenant was brought to fulfillment in the New Testament. Through Israel, the entire world...

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing...

The essential thing “in heaven and earth” is... that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life...

A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.

We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered ...

Blessed is the man who gets the opportunity to devote his life to something bigger than himself and who finds himself surrounded by friends who share his passion.