christian living on Oxymoron

Humble. Before Jesus, almost no pagan author had used “humble” as a compliment. Yet the events of Christmas point inescapably to what seems like an oxymoron: a humble God. The God who came to earth ca...

Love takes up where knowledge leaves off.

In the Greco-Roman world of Paul’s day, humility was a despised trait. They viewed it as a sign of weakness. And our culture today is no different from that world of two thousand years ago. Maybe it’s...

In her engaging treatment, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes both the beauty and pain of seeing our own sinful nature: It is often true that once we are made to see, we don’t like w...

[If] Christ is not all to you he is nothing to you. He will never go into partnership as a part Savior of men. If he be something he must be everything, and if he be not everything he is nothing to yo...

Hence, whatever certain people have in superabundance is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succoring the poor.

To accept this [Jesus' self-humiliation in washing the disciples' feet] is to be converted. And nothing can be added to this. If you imagine that you can add something to what is given in the ...

True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.

You are our strength, Lord, we will love you, under the shadow of your wings, protect us. Jesus, son of David, have mercy on us, that you may open the eyes of our hearts. We shall call to you with the...

O Jesus Christ, who fed the multitudes upon the hillside, feed us now with your Word, that we too may be filled. Amen. God of truth, who desires that we live by your truth, may the words spoken this d...

We are what we love. If we love God, in whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in him and we cannot help being happy: we have already achieved something of the fullness of being for which ...

Nor, indeed, can a man properly be said to save anything, if he only lays it up. You may as well throw your money into the sea, as bury it in the earth. And you may as well bury it in the earth, as in...

The ultimate reason for our misery, however, is that we do not love God supremely. As Augustine so famously put it in prayer, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they fin...

O Lord Jesus Christ, enthroned in the majesty of heaven, who, when you came forth from God, did make yourself one that serves: We adore you because you did lay aside the garment of your glory, and clo...

St. Paul tells us that Jesus Christ, the revelation of God become human, “set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It wa...

If we minimize grace, the world sees no hope for salvation. If we minimize truth, the world sees no need for salvation.

The fact that our works are done in the service of God is not enough, by itself, to prevent us from losing our interior life if we let them devour all our time and all our strength. Work is good and n...

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting to-day for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market… Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system…. Chea...

Beloved of God, go now in peace. Go to love. Go to serve. Go with the unending blessing of the One, True, Living God Father – Son – Spirit. Amen.

In the one place in the Bible where the Son of God pulls back the veil and lets us peer way down into the core of who he is, we are not told that he is “austere and demanding in heart.” We are not tol...

Lord Jesus Christ, you gave up everything to come down from heaven in order to love and serve us. Unlike you, we find self-sacrifice hard. Most of us look for ways to puff ourselves up, so that we loo...

Almighty God, we pray for your blessing on the church in this place. Here may the faithful find salvation, and the careless be awakened. Here may the doubting find faith, and the anxious be encou...

A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-and might be even more difficult...

God is looking for people through whom He can do the impossible. What a pity that we plan only the things we can do by ourselves.

We all need [blessing] desperately. It is the one great need we all share in common. We were born for it and there is no lasting joy without it. What oxygen is for the lungs and protein for the body, ...

Though lords still exist today in some parts of the world, the term is used mostly as an honorary badge, so it’s easy to forget what the term even means. Throughout history, lords were rulers who had ...

It is possible also to come at Christianity from a rather different point of view as well, seeing it as something not too difficult but too simple for us, too basic, something to be apprehended theref...

There’s a story of a young girl on a plane who was reading her Bible, and there was a businessman sitting next to her. He looked over to her and he said, you don’t really believe that do you?” And she...

The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.

The Swiss-German novelist Hermann Hesse published a short story in 1932 called "Journey to the East." In it, a group of men go on a long journey. Throughout their trip, they are accompanied ...