dreams on Church Culture

Following the biblical pattern, the church has always assumed that God can communicate spiritual truths to people through their imaginations, especially through dreams and visions. Church history is r...

He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

Our culture is so fixated on dying and going to heaven when the whole Scripture is about heaven coming to earth.

Most of us in the United States know the famous “I have a Dream” speech Martin Luther King Jr. gave at the Lincoln Memorial as part of the 1963 March on Washington. On a sweltering, humid day in the n...

God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.

AIM Commentary Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? A Gospel for a Jewish Community Matthew’s Gospel presents a favorable view of the Jewish Law and its traditions. In...

God of Grace–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: You are good and You are almighty. You alone are worthy of our faith and trust and so we come to You with our hopes and hurts, our disappointments and dreams...

Sometimes, of course, the sense of God with us becomes much more distinct. My oldest brother, J. I. Willard, served for over thirty years as a minister under the blessing of God. But his entry into th...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? A Gospel for a Jewish Community Matthew’s Gospel presents a favorable view of the Jewish Law and its traditions. In contrast to Luke...

I have come to see clearly that life is more than self. It is more than doing what I want, striving for what will benefit me, dreaming of all I can be. Life is all about my relationship with God. Ther...

One of the seductions that continues to bedevil Christian obedience is the construction of utopias, whether in fact or fantasy, ideal places where we can live the good and blessed and righteous life w...

The thrust of the parables is to subvert the distorted myths in which people live their lives. To understand what we mean by “living in a myth” just think of a couple of our own contemporary myths. Ta...

God, our Father: Your love gives us more than we can ever hope for, and far beyond what we deserve. You clothe us in the righteousness of Christ. You give us dreams and visions of what we can become b...

God has not promised to bless our good motives, dreams, and innovation. He has promised to bless his plan; that plan is that disciples make other disciples—everything else is a sideshow.

Let the current of your being set towards God, then your life will be.

Lord—You are coming in power someday—and You are already here, near at-hand. You know us entirely—you know our wants and needs, our dreams and hopes, our disappointments and griefs--and yet You are no...

Disturb us, Lord, when we are too pleased with ourselves; when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little; when we arrived safely because we sailed too close to the shore. Disturb us, Lo...

Matthew 2:13–23 sits within Matthew’s infancy narrative (chapters 1–2), which serves as a theological introduction to Jesus’ identity and mission. Unlike Luke’s account, which emphasizes the humble bi...

Pentecost is an invitation to dream. For when a community of faith quits dreaming dreams, it has little to offer either its members or the wider world. These dreams involve adopting a new perspective ...

Matthew 2:13–23 sits within Matthew’s infancy narrative (chapters 1–2), which serves as a theological introduction to Jesus’ identity and mission. Unlike Luke’s account, which emphasizes the humble bi...

Our inclination is to reveal to God only what we feel comfortable in sharing. Naturally, we want to love and be loved by God, but we also want to keep a little corner of ourselves, where we can hide a...

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then it was said among the nations, “The LORD ha...

Author and Episcopal priest Stephanie Spellers suggests that instead of imagining a kingdom, a better way for us to understand what Jesus had in mind when he spoke of this script, this new way of livi...

Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.

When the LORD restored the fortunes of _______, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then it was said among the people, "The ...

Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is no...

Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's...

You may not have heard of Phil Vischer, but you have heard his voice. He is the creator of the wildly successful Veggie Tales and provided the voice of Bob the Tomato. Veggie Tales was massively s...

Martin of Tours became a great leader of the monastic movement in the West. In his early life, Martin was conscripted as a soldier in the Roman army. During this time, he became a catechumen (that is,...

In his book The Case for Grace , pastor and author Lee Strobel describes a dream he had as a child after having a significant argument with his father. Strobel does what most of us would do at that...