christian living on Identity

I am not what I might be, I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I wish to be, I am not what I hope to be. But I thank God I am not what I once was, and I can say with the great apostle, "By ...

Here’s a testimony from Lisa Sharon Harper, author of The Very Good Gospel: Harper grew up as a child of a single mother. After her parents divorced, she and her mother moved from Philadelphia where ...

The ways Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing disembodied, nothing abstract, nothing impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular and local. The ways em...

A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act li...

A friend sat down in a small London restaurant and picked up a menu. “What will it be?” the waiter asked. Studying the puzzling selections, my friend said, “Uhh …” The waiter smiled. “Oh, a Yank. What...

Our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and “trying to carry it out. The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself....

The vision that Jesus gives us is this: That I am unconditionally loved, that I belong to God, and that I am a person who can really trust that. When I meet another person who also is rooted in the he...

My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.

It takes no grace to relate to someone who looks, thinks, and acts just like me . . . The more we love, and the more unlikely people we love, the more we resemble God — who, after all, loves ornery cr...

Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.

The word “acceptance” has an interesting origin. It comes from the Latin ad capere, which means to “take to oneself.” What does that mean? It’s a paradoxical truth, but in order for us to accept other...

Belonging can be such a fickle and painful process in life. As the popular researcher and writer Brené Brown describes in her book, Braving the Wilderness, she struggled to fit in after moving to New ...

Our inclination is to reveal to God only what we feel comfortable in sharing. Naturally, we want to love and be loved by God, but we also want to keep a little corner of ourselves, where we can hide a...

The ancient Greek word for actor was hypocritēs (ὑποκρῐτής), which, at first, only implied someone who explained or interpreted something. But by New Testament times, it was more negative. It suggest...

The question of performance-free love transcends ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status. “Am I forever loved for who I am? Is the background elevator music to our hearts.

Gracious God, we confess that we are often dissatisfied with our lives. We recognize the gap that exists between what we are and what we want to be. Lord, like the woman at the well, we know our failu...

It’s difficult for people to love the real you when you are covering up who you really are. We connect with others when we take our mask off and let others in.

You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental ...

We are people of desire. We want things. We long for things. It is primal to our nature to yearn. As Saint Augustine reflected, “The whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing. . . . That is o...

The immortal Spirit . . . is forever tugging us toward him.

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 ...

Though I tweet like Justin Bieber and have more Facebook friends than the pope; though I get a BA from Cal and an MBA from Stanford; though I invented Snapchat and Uber; though I have great hair and w...

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you,...

Creator of all things, Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End, Father, Shepherd, Servant, Brother, Priest and King. Whose love poured out mends broken hearts. Whose wounded hands reach out to all. Whose S...

“Gentle and lowly.” This, according to his own testimony, is Christ’s very heart. This is who he is. Tender. Open. Welcoming. Accommodating. Understanding. Willing. If we are asked to say only one th...

The soul can also manifest physical symptoms of need. I like to think of it this way: Just like my stomach growls when I’m hungry for physical food, my spirit tends to growl when I’m in need of spirit...

Much that we have interpreted as a defect of sanctification in church people is really an outgrowth of their loss of bearing with respect to justification. Christians who are no longer sure that God l...

There was what an Orthodox Hasidic rabbi had said on a flight westward. He’d put his prayer shawl in the overhead compartment and sat down, sweeping aside the tassels dangling from his pockets. And so...

God’s grace is present in all people and cultures. As we submit ourselves to learning from other cultures, we catch glimpses of God’s grace that would be unavailable in our own culture.

What I’ve come to realize is if I really want to “meet Jesus,” then I have to get a lot closer to the people He created. All of them, not just some of them.