christianity on Desperation

Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.

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...

In a journal entry by the Danish Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the great existentialist philosopher describes the importance not simply of grasping the truth of the Christian faith, but having the tr...

American religion is conspicuous for its messianically pretentious energy, its embarassingly banal prose, and its impatiently hustling ambition.

Christianity is a rescue religion. It declares that God has taken the initiative in Jesus Christ to rescue us from our sins. This is the main theme of the Bible. You are to give him the name Jesus, be...

Every other religion and philosophy says you have to do something to connect to God; but Christianity says no, Jesus Christ came to do for you what you couldn’t do for yourself. Every other religion s...

A Christianity which will not help those who are struggling from the bottom to the top of society, needs another Christ to die for it.

Yes, religion is a crutch. But it’s not my own personal crutch. It is Adam’s crutch. It’s the human race that walks (if it walks at all) with a limp. And so when Sunday morning comes around I drag old...

I consider that the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration...

I’ve served on staff at a few different churches throughout Silicon Valley for the last decade and a half, including a medium-sized church, a young church plant, and a multisite megachurch. At each, w...

We are settling for a Christianity that revolves around catering to ourselves when the central message of Christianity is actually about abandoning ourselves.

My friend Mike Metzger of the Clapham Institute once used the following example to demonstrate how important frames are if we are to make sense of reality’s puzzle. This may seem like a head scratcher...

It is a phone call no parent wants to receive. “Jerry,” Bethany said, “Catherine’s had a little accident.” “Accident! How bad?” “She’s going to be okay. You want to talk to her? We’re in a kind of am...

American Christianity is a story of perpetual upheavals in churches and individual lives. Starting with the extraordinary conversion experience, our lives are motivated by a constant expectation for t...

You have noticed, I expect, that Christ Himself sometimes describes the Christian way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, “Take up your Cross”—in other words, it is like going to be beaten ...

You cannot build a church on consumers. They'll desert you at a moment's notice because they have no commitments beyond meeting their own needs. Jesus can take twelve disciples and build a mov...

I fear that much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes our task is to save appearances by protecting God from Job-like anguish. But if God is the God of Jesus Christ, then God does not need ou...

On the whole, though, Catholics (and Protestants) aren’t identifiable at first glance. Yet, on Ash Wednesday I’m always surprised by the number of people I see on the streets and in the subways sporti...

When we believe that we should be satisfied rather than God glorified in our worship, then we put God below ourselves as though He had been made for us rather than that we had been made for Him.

The Oxford scholar and apologist C. S. Lewis... once closed a lecture to a group of apologists like this:  I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologis...

Summary The Text: 1 Peter 3:13-22 In the first chapter of this letter, Peter sets out the reason for writing. He affirms the eternal state of the believer:  Blessed be the God and Father of our Lo...

In this satirical excerpt from How to be a Perfect Christian by the Babylon Bee, the point becomes clear that our often-consumeristic approach to church leaves much to be desired: You want to be a p...

The farmers in the old prairie days used to prepare for a winter storm by putting up a rope between the house and the barn. They did this because they knew that in a swirling blizzard, even a brief di...

Conversion in the U.S. seems to mean we’ve exchanged some of our shopping at Wal-Mart, Blockbuster, and Borders for the Christian Bookstore down the street. We’ve taken our lack of purchasing control ...

Hold material goods and wealth on a flat palm and not in a clenched fist.

If one looks at the world scene from a missionary point of view, surely the most striking fact is that, while in great areas of Asia and Africa the church is growing, often growing rapidly, in the lan...

But what seems to happen in our lived practice of worship is that we don’t simply enjoy the stimulation; we expect it from God. We don’t just value “positive” emotions, but in our lived experience and...

Jesus, as always, gets caught in the middle—along with a good number of his followers. Many people in America today were brought up in strict Christian homes and churches of one sort or another. There...

To those who only know it outwardly, Christianity seems desperately intricate. In reality, taken in its main lines, it contains an extremely simple and astonishingly bold solution of the world. In the...

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it’s been found difficult and not tried.