christian living on Wickedness

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...

I asked her what was so scary about unmerited free grace? She replied something like this: If I was saved by my good works -- then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through....

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...

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...

Challenges to holiness without mention of grace force a human-centered religion. After all, people cannot do what they are told to do apart from Christ’s grace. That’s John 15:5, right? “Apart from me...

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

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...

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 ...

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 preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace ...

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

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...

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.

People in the world naturally want to boss others. Imagine a boy beginning work with a firm. He has a lowly place and is ordered around by everyone. Do this! Do that! Every dirty job is his. He is the...

If you are ready to partake of grace you have not to atone for your sins--you have merely to accept of the atonement. All that you want to do is to cry, "God have mercy upon me," and you wil...

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...

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 ...

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...

One of the most powerful expressions of humble, servant-like caring for others is found in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce , in the character of Sarah Smith of Golders Green. Her quiet life of love tra...

God saves by persuasion, not compulsion, for compulsion is no attribute of God.

May we ask according to your will, not according to our desires, for you will give us what is right for us. May we seek you as the pearl of great price, not half-heartedly but with our whole being, fo...

The way most of us serve keeps us in control. We choose whom, when, where and how we will serve. We stay in charge. Jesus is calling for something else. He is calling us to be servants. When we make t...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

I place no value on anything I have or may possess, except in relation to the kingdom of God. If anything will advance the interests of the kingdom, it shall be given away or kept, only as by giving o...

Jesus came to show us what life in the kingdom looked like, not how to modify how the world did things.

We know but little now about the conditions of the life that is to come. But what is certain is that Love must last. God, the Eternal God, is Love. Covet, therefore, that everlasting gift.

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,...