god on Thoughtlesness

Gracious God, your Son Jesus came not be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many. He is our Good Shepherd, whose leadership is less about the love of power, and more about the ...

A Christian counselor once commented on people hiding from God. “Think about it. The very first people in the history of the world, Adam and Eve, hid from God when they realized their nakedness after ...

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’...

The one misery of man is self-will, the one secret of blessedness is the conquest over our own wills. To yield them up to God is rest and peace. What disturbs us in this world is not “trouble,” but ou...

In his prose and poetry, David Whyte shares what David Brooks refers to as “emotional joy” in his book, While not necessarily unique to the Christian, this type of joy has the ability to draw us towar...

Martin Heidegger said that being is presence. Whatever else this means, it suggests that in some way presence is a basic property of simply being. Everything that exists has presence by virtue of its ...

Dearest Father, we long for light, but dwell in darkness. We crave the warmth of the sun, but crawl into our caverns of sin and sadness. We are a people who prefer the misery and melancholy that we kn...

The kingdom is present not in grandiose accomplishments, but in showing practical love in humble ways, day after day, and in refusing to allow our failures and disappointments to hide God’s love from ...

Most of us know Mother Teresa for her stalwart ministry to the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. But as with each of us, there is a public side of our lives and a private side. Mother Tere...

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...

The other enemy of the soul, meaninglessness…chokes out life with equal vigor. Meaninglessness woos us into spending our one shot at life on insignificant and trivial things. If we are not vigilant, w...

Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness li...

We’re little children wandering the aisles of the internet because we’ve lost the presence of our loving parent. We are desperate for the attention of a good Father who sees us. We have no idea how to...

Writer Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938), after years of seeking happiness, articulated his gloomy assessment of life: The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being ...

In The Lord of the Rings, Denethor is a steward of Gondor, the great kingdom of men. He comes from a long line of stewards who have ruled Gondor as temporary lords while the kingdom waited for the n...

Desert spirituality is characterized by the pursuit of abundant simplicity—simplicity grounded in the possession of little and the abundance of God’s presence. Yearning for complete union with God, de...

God uses the nobodies to show himself to be somebody. God uses the nothings to show himself to be something. And maybe you feel like a nobody, a nothing. My friend, you're the one God's chosen...

In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the characters of Boromir and Frodo illustrate well the dichotomy between exaltation and service.  As a mighty warrior and heir-apparent to be the leader his...

Being salt and light demands two things: we practice purity in the midst of a fallen world and yet we live in proximity to this fallen world. If you don't hold up both truth in tension, you invari...

Every prayerless day is a statement by a helpless individual, ‘I do not need God today.’ Failing to pray reflects idolatry – a trust in substitutes for God. We rely on our money instead of God’s provi...

Love alone makes heavy burdens light and bears in equal balance things pleasing and displeasing. Love bears a heavy burden and does not feel it, and love makes bitter things tasteful and sweet.

Little kingdom living is an endless search for earthly treasure and unending focus on personal need; Grace calls you to a bigger kingdom.

Dolce far niente—“the sweetness of doing nothing.” One of the most powerful soul-training exercises I have ever done is a practice called holy leisure. In simple terms, holy leisure is “doing nothi...

One day, as Leo Tolstoy, the renowned Russian author, was walking down the street when he encountered a man in worn, shabby clothing. The homeless man asked him if he had any money to spare. Tolstoy s...

Jesus, though you were in very nature God, you did not consider equality with God as something to be used to your own advantage. Rather, you humbled yourself, you made yourself nothing. Lord, you are ...

In an article entitled, What the New Atheists Don’t See , the British author Theodore Dalrymple shares his honest struggles with atheism. The subtitle of his article is fascinating, “To regret re...

The fact is there is nothing that we are doing that God could not raise up a stone in the field to do for him. The realization of this puts us in our true place. Though, lest we get too knocked down b...

The Lord Jesus who calls us to worship him today is the same Jesus who refused the temptation to worship the evil one. Rather than receive the glorious kingdoms of this world, he endured the shame of ...

God has neither form nor shape under which we can know Him; when he speaks of Himself in metaphors and similes, He is adapting Himself to our foolishness, our limited capacity.

Self-made and self-sufficient people live in a fantasy world, empty of the reality of God. In contrast, the poor in spirit are deeply aware of being God-made and God-sufficient: