relationships and community on Putting God in a Box

Our God has boundless resources. The only limit is in us. Our asking, our thinking, our praying are too small. Our expectations are too limited.

You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.

Our vision is more obstructed by what we think we know than by our lack of knowledge.

Men box God into the contents of personal experiences, and then seek to define his attributes by this limited exposure to eternity.

The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge...

I don’t know what I did wrong. But he had that “calmer than calm” look that hid a rage inside. I picked up the phone and saw her name. Not now. I can’t handle her right now. I scanned the room, lookin...

Curiously enough, it is a fear of how grace will change and improve them that keeps many souls away from God. They want God to take them as they are and let them stay that way. They want Him to take a...

You may remember the old “village atheist” trick of putting a watch on the podium and saying, “Now, if there is a God, in five minutes he must strike me dead.” Not a single person who has given that c...

In a class that I was in once, I saw a man with his well-worn, heavily marked Bible open before him, playing a game of “trap the teacher.” He should have known better than to try to trap this particul...

It’s important to note that God does not obliterate the darkness; rather, God names it and limits it—puts boundaries on it. The boundary is the light.

Everything in the universe is all jumbled together. So God begins to do some creative separating: he separates light from darkness, day from night, water from land, the sea creatures from the land cru...

God of the Impossible – Father, Son and Holy Spirit: There’s nothing too hard for you to do, Nothing too complex for You to understand, No place we go that You’re not there, No sin too heinous tha...

Frank Buchman, an American Lutheran who founded the First Century Christian Fellowship in 1921, later renamed the Oxford Group in 1928, was known for his belief in divine guidance. One evening, Presid...

Seek the Lord while he may be found. Call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts. Let him return to the Lord, and he will have mercy on him, to o...

One particularly crafty, if not insidious way a “good works” righteousness can seep into our theology is by positioning faith as the pre-eminent work. We must never forget that faith itself is a...

This is the beautiful community that Herman Bavinck gets at when he writes, The image of God is much too rich for it to be fully realized in a single human being, however richly gifted that human bein...

Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just. Such a God is an idol of your own.

Wrong ideas about God make it impossible for us to function in relationship with one another.

One of humanity’s problems is forgetfulness. Forgetfulness can happen at multiple levels, from a simple problem of recall to a posture of hard-heartedness and disobedience toward the command-giver. Wh...

God has come to us and revealed Himself fully to us Yet too often we hide ourselves from His love and salvation Instead of focusing on you, Lord God, we focus on ourselves Instead of trusting yo...

If you’ve ever run a business or led a team of people, you know what it’s like to send someone in your place. You know they’re going to interact with a person who might not know you, and that person w...

Imagine you have an invisible recorder around your neck that, for all your life, records every time you say to somebody else, “You ought.” It only turns on when you tell somebody else how to live. In ...

Leader: The Lord searches us and knows us. God discerns our thoughts and is acquainted with all our ways. People: Even the darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day, for darknes...

We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, na...

Leader: Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. All: Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you a...

They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour's work as for a day's. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than ...

Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary And his understanding no one can fathom. He gives st...

Pastor: The LORD is in his holy temple; the LORD’s throne is in heaven; his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man. All: The LORD tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the o...

In this short excerpt from C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, the fictional demon Screwtape complains to his advisor Wormwood about all the pleasures God has created that point back to a loving creator: ...