christian living on Misunderstanding

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...

God—our Father ... our Savior ... our Counselor and Friend: Thank you for daring to meet us at the most unlikely places, and in the most unexpected times of our lives. Thank you for redeeming our pain...

The search for knowledge can go wrong, not as a result of individual, erroneous judgments or of mistakes creeping in at different points, but because of one single mistake at the beginning… Faith does...

Please give us mercy, Oh Lord, for how we have misused your word. We ignore it, discredit it, weaponize it, and commandeer it to prop ourselves up. Instead, please make us humble, bring us low, so tha...

On a cold January day, a forty-three-year-old man was sworn in as the chief executive of his country. By his side stood his predecessor, a famous general who, fifteen years earlier, had commanded his ...

Belief doesn’t create truth. Unbelief doesn’t destroy truth. Christian faith goes beyond reason but not against reason.

After the fall of our first parents, boundaries were something to push past, to transgress. It’s worth pausing to note how we use the word transgression for “sin.”  With its Latin roots, “across” and ...

The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.

Becoming a teachable person has two prerequisites: There must be a teacher and a person willing to be taught. Increasingly, Western culture has become an environment that celebrates and platforms the ...

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

O heavenly Father, the author and fountain of all truth, the bottomless sea of all understanding, send, we beg you, your Holy Spirit into our hearts, and lighten our understandings with the beams of y...

By misinterpreting the Enlightenment and the corresponding rise of empiricism as an existential threat to Christian faith, many frightened Christians sequestered themselves into rooms of certitude.

I wonder what would happen if we all agreed to read one of the Gospels until we came to a place that told us to do something, then went out to do it, and only after we had done it, began reading again...

Reading the Bible without applying it to your life can be downright dangerous. On August 3, 1996, Melvin Hitchens, sat on his front porch and read the Bible. After his Bible reading, this 66 year old ...

A person who suffers bitterly when slighted or insulted should recognize from this that he still harbors the ancient serpent in his breast. If he quietly endures the insult or responds with great humi...

Generous Lord Jesus We confess that we do not receive others with compassion. We object to being interrupted And respond with anger or frustration. We confess that we do not share generously Not trus...

A Louisiana farmer’s favorite mule fell into a well. After studying the situation, the farmer came to the conclusion that he couldn’t pull the mule out, so he might as well bury him. It would be the h...

In this excerpt from his book Faith in the Shadows, pastor and author Austin Fischer shares a surprising truth about the need to be vulnerable with our own faith if we are likely to have a positive im...

You will never make yourself feel that you are a sinner, because there is a mechanism in you as a result of sin that will always be defending you against every accusation. We are all on very good term...

O Lord, heavenly Father, in whom is the fullness of light and wisdom, enlighten our minds by your Holy Spirit, and give us grace to receive your Word with reverence and humility, without which no o...

Gracious God, sometimes I am so caught up in my failures, in all the ways I am not like you, that I neglect the deeper truth, the earlier truth of Genesis 1. You have made me, as a human being, in you...

Ramandu’s daughter: "You can't know, you can only believe - or not."

In 1914, not long after the sinking of the Titanic, Congress convened a hearing to discern what happened in another nautical tragedy. In January of that year, in thick fog off the Virginia Coast, the ...

Dear Heavenly Father, we lower our heads before you and we confess that we have too often forgotten that we are yours. Sometimes we carry on our lives as if there was no God and we fall short of being...

By forgiving another, I am trusting that God is a better justice-maker than I am.

Stop being so sure that you are always right, and others wrong. Don't trust your own opinion, when you find it contrary to that of older men, and especially to that of your own parents. Age gives ...

Many years ago a senior executive of the then Standard Oil Company made a wrong decision that cost the company more than $2 million. John D. Rockefeller was then running the firm. On the day the news ...

A friend of mine who is an entrepreneur was listening to a CD of a series of messages I had given on the Beatitudes. When he came to meekness, he told me, he skipped over it. He wasn’t interested in b...

Therefore let us repent and pass from ignorance to knowledge, from foolishness to wisdom, from licentiousness to self-control, from injustice to righteousness, from godlessness to God.

God our Father We confess to you and to one another That we have been quick to anger And slow to mercy We have paid back abuse with abuse Hatred with hatred And violence with violence The world does n...