christian living on Perspective

Emerson once observed, Do you love me? actually means Do you see the same truth? Or at least . . . Do you care about the same truth?”

Heavenly Father, You shower Your love on us throughout every stage of life. We praise You for Your steadfast love. Through Your Son we see the extent of that love while through Your Spirit we experien...

God and Father of all, in your love you made all the nations of the world to be a family, and your Son taught us to love one another. Yet our world is riven apart with prejudice, arrogance, and pride....

Deacon or other leader Let us pray for the Church and for the world. Grant, Almighty God, that all who confess your Name may be united in your truth, live together in your love, and reveal your glo...

To focus our expectation in an otherworldly salvation has the potential to dissipate our resistance to societal evil and the dedication needed to work for the redemptive transformation of this world.

HOMILETICS, n. The science of adapting sermons to the spiritual needs, capacities and conditions of the congregation.

The central vision of world history in the Bible is that all of creation is one, every creature in community with every other, living in harmony and security toward the joy and well-being of every oth...

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...

The more I understand people and their needs, the more I am persuaded that God has uniquely designed the local church to respond to those needs.

N. T. Wright relates a story from Josephus that illustrates the meaning of "repent and believe" in the first century. Around AD 66, Josephus made a military expedition to Galilee to put dow...

In His free grace, God is for man in every respect; He surrounds man from all sides. He is man's Lord who is before him, above him, after him, and thence also with him in history, the locus of man...

I pray that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and heig...

‘Salvation’ is a wonderfully wide-ranging word and it would be a great mistake to think that it refers only to the forgiveness of our sins. God is as much concerned with our present and future as with...

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...

Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace.

Family and property, then, were not for the ancient Jew simply what they are to the modern western world. Both carried religious and cultural significance far beyond personal, let alone “individual,” ...

Just as every natural event is the manifestation at a particular place and moment of Nature's total character, so every particular Christian miracle manifests at a particular place and moment the ...

From its very beginning the Bible sees human life in terms of relationships...The Bible does not speak about "humanity" but about "all the families of the earth" or "all the n...

There’s a quote by H. Richard Niebuhr that I believe is absolutely true.  “The great Christian revolutions,” he argued, “come not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen w...

Our love to God is measured by our everyday fellowship with others and the love it displays.

What is meant by fellowship in this verse? Gossip? Cups of tea? Tours? No. What is being referred to is something of a quite different order and on a quite different level. “They met constantly to hea...

Free us, Lord, from our obsession with ourselves long enough to care for others; to be so concerned about the well-being of the human community that me don’t have to worry about our place, our church,...

In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centered on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an in...

Billy Graham had a weekly radio show titled The Hour of Decision. Normally it was a tape recording of the service and message he’d given at a recent evangelistic rally. And at the conclusion of every ...

One key difference between much of the early church vs. the church of today (at least in the West) was the belief in, and regular experience of, miracles. As Joel Green, the noted professor and writer...

Wondrous God Father-Son-Spirit Your joy is our strength Nothing more Nothing less Nothing else Grant us grace to receive you and your joy Grant us grace to trust it above all other powers and plans ...

If I am asked to break the gospel and a gospel culture down into simple statements, I would borrow imagery from the man from Northern Ireland, from Belfast, C. S. Lewis. From The Lion, the Witch and t...

The piling on of grace upon grace is incredible. God had given us his Son. We killed him. In response God says, “I want to forgive you and offer another ‘family member,’ so to speak.” It was a case of...

Now of course, none of us is perfect, and all of us fail in all kinds of ways. That is why we often protect ourselves a bit when we say things like, “Don’t look at me, or don’t look at Christians; loo...

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread; and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. ...