christian living on Ignorance

Contempt is so painful To be dismissed, disregarded Questioning instead of dignity Accusation instead of personhood I have felt its sting and hollowness As have you, my Jesus Help me hear the needed m...

If we do anything to further the kingdom of God, we may expect to find what Christ found on that road - abuse, indifference, injustice, misunderstanding, trouble of some kind. Take it. Why not? To tha...

Jesus doesn’t just use the shepherd metaphor when he refers to himself as the door. Over and over in the Bible, we are compared to sheep. Some people think it’s heartwarming. But I hate to tell you, i...

I think the most selfish, self-centered individual in this world is not an unsaved person. It's a Christian who accepts the salvation God offers freely and goes out and lives for himself.

The fourth-century emperor Julian (AD 331-336) feared [Christians] might take over the empire. Referring to Christians as “Galileans” and Christianity as “atheism” (because of their denial of the exis...

In Silence, Shusaku Endo writes of the journey of Portuguese Jesuits journeying to Japan. It is a conversation about those who intend to take the path of Jesus, only to find they are on the path of Ju...

Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

In another day and age, God, religion and church enjoyed the general respect of the culture. Not today. Religion is suspect, church is weird, and Christians are hypocrites. Distrust has become the nor...

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...

What self denial! What self abasement! What self emptying! He, whom no infinitudes can hold, is contained within infant’s age, and infant’s form. Can it be, that the great ‘I AM THAT I AM’ shrinks int...

Heavenly Father, we confess that we have too often forgotten that we are Yours. At times, we live our lives as if there was no God and we fall short of being who You created us to be. We have lived fo...

The hole in our holiness is that we don’t really care much about it. Passionate exhortation to pursue gospel-driven holiness is barely heard in most of our churches. It’s not that we don’t talk about ...

We fixate on sins of commission far too much. We practice holiness by subtraction-don't do this, don't do that, and you're okay. The problem with that is this: you can do nothing wrong and...

In the New Testament sin is not merely an individual, privatized transgression of a moral standard (sins is typically used for specific transgressions). It is far more radical than that. Sin is a mist...

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once told a parable to illustrate the urgency of the gospel message—and the need for all believers, not just clergy, to share it. A traveling circus in Denm...

Never doubt in the dark what God showed you in the light

We are what we believe we are.

I am not perfect, and I will struggle with the “old Jim,” who was and is influenced by American culture, narratives and values. But the key is that identity comes before behavior. We almost always do ...

This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing towar...

Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation...

Christian disunity is and remains a massive impediment to the gospel itself—the proclamation of which is and should be evangelicalism’s strong suit.

Jesus describes his followers as being “salt” and “light” in the world in Matthew 5. When you think about salt, it doesn’t really have a whole lot of value when it’s just sitting in a salt shaker. Si...

The Christian religion as a religion is not of God. It is on the contrary another example of a mortal road to God like the Buddhist or any other, although of course different in form. Christ is not th...

The Christian’s self-understanding is that she is precious before God—however much a sinner, however much a failure (or success) she may be by the standards of worldly comparisons—and that every other...

Verb two: God chose. “Just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love” (Eph.1:4) Everybody I have ever become acquainted with has a story,...

In an early Christian document known as the Epistle to Diognetus (c. A.D. 120-200), the author wrote a response to some propaganda circulating in the Roman Empire. People had spread false rumors about...

The Son of God did not want to be seen and found in heaven. Therefore he descended from heaven into this humility and came to us in our flesh, laid himself into the womb of his mother and into the man...

Far too many people, especially within evangelicalism, think that the individual is all that matters, and that the corporate dimension is a distraction or diversion. Of course Christianity is deeply p...

Your torture puts hostility to death Your broken body breaks down every dividing wall Your blood makes us blood What wondrous truth What dazzling grace Bring us near again, Jesus Help us remember an...

Gracious God, You have called us out of darkness and into the light of Your love. You have redeemed us and made us whole in order to set us free from bondage. The challenge You place before us is to d...