faith and work on Firm Belief

Let’s talk about how our beliefs shape our actions, especially when fear is involved. You've probably heard the phrase, "ideas have consequences," right? It's easy to see this in act...

One day when George MacDonald, the great Scottish preacher and writer, was talking with his son, the conversation turned to heaven and the prophets’ version of the end of all things. “It seems too goo...

G. K. Chesterton was well-known (and iconoclastic) in his defense of tradition in a time when progress was all the rage in Western Europe- in technology, in the sciences, in philosophy. Chesterton, on...

The hymnwriter and theologian F. W. Faber writes with beautiful prose the challenges that each one of us faces when it comes to living a life faithfully according to the truth that is within us: M...

We might say that convictions are firmly held moral or religious beliefs that guide our beliefs, actions, or choices.

We must do our business faithfully; without trouble or disquiet, recalling our mind to GOD mildly, and with tranquility, as often as we find it wandering from Him.

There’s no shortage of the religiously faithless who seem eager to tell us what faith is. Many of these characterizations of faith are reminiscent of Mark Twain’s precocious schoolboy who quipped, “Fa...

Faithfulness in small things is a big thing to God.

Only faith survives; faith which is not a work, not even a negative work; not an achievement, not even the achievement of humility. . . . Faith is the ground, the new order, the light. . . . Faith is ...

If you think of your identity and heart as an engine, you could say there is a kind of fuel that powers it cleanly and efficiently—and a kind of fuel that is not only polluting but also destroys the e...

We do not therefore by faith make void the law, but rather establish it.

Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.

Faith is a redirecting of our sight, a getting out of the focus of our own vision and getting God into focus.

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the Lord’s work, because you know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord. Inclusive Version Therefore, my beloved b...

Writing about ministering to postmodern skeptics, Don Everts and Doug Schaupp share a helpful insight into the mystery of God's movement: The first lesson they have taught us about the path to f...

I’m a paranoid agnostic. I don’t think God exists, but I’m sure there is some sort of force out there working against me.

In his book The Allure of Gentleness , Dallas Willard includes a thought-provoking excerpt from Richard Robinson, a prominent atheist thinker from the mid-20th century. In his work An Atheist’...

I believe any dream worth birthing will require fierce labor to bring it forth. Some of those painful, spiritual contractions you’ve been feeling are not necessarily indicators that you are out of God...

Faith means to be apprehended by that which is not ourselves, to be seized by God.

First, most Christians attach their convictions to Christ personally. In other words, we form our convictions in order to please Jesus, not ourselves. Convictions do not express what we think or feel ...

But here’s the truth: what we do is not the truest thing about us. Building our identity on the foundation of what we do creates an identity that can crack or break or tumble down at any moment.

More often than not, park-it-at-the-door thinking [about religious faith] has less to do with hostility to faith than with the avoidance of risk, for many employer’s fear that any hint of religion is ...

He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of sel...

If the Book of Job reaches across two and a half millennia to teach anything to men and women who consider themselves normal, decent human beings, it is this: Human beings are sure to wander in ignora...

“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”

On several occasions I have known the name of the victor before the end of the contest. Being a pastor, I’m often unable to watch the Sunday football games. While I am preaching, the teams are playing...

First, we do not believe that strong convictions cause incivility. Instead, we believe poorly formed convictions cause incivility.

Resilience for faith leaders is the ability to wisely persevere toward the mission God has put before them amid both the external challenges and the internal resistance of the leader’s followers.

Martin Lindstrom observes: When people viewed images associated with the strong brands-the iPods, the Harley-Davidson, the Ferrari, and others-their -their brains registered the exact same patterns of...

Brandon and Faith Lee, who started Bird and Branch Coffee, are what faithful witnesses look like. When they sat down across from my wife and me, they had a dream to start a coffee shop that would serv...