human nature on Spiritual Hunger

When he died, he sent his Spirit to teach us the intricacies of the art of living. That’s why his Spirit is the only One who can fill our spiritual vacuum, helping us become truly human.

Before my mentor, Dallas Willard, passed over to glory, I asked him what he thought about the rapid rise of the Christian spiritual formation movement. He said, “It is a wonderful thing, but my fear i...

When we cannot find the words to pray, we are not faithless. We are feeling the fact that we are both embodied and vulnerable.

A large part of what it means to be human is to be one who longs after things. Sometimes, we have trouble putting into words the longings inside us. Take for example these words from Anne Frank, just ...

The journalist Andrew Sullivan has some strong words of advice for the modern church,  If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, p...

Man becomes human with the eating of bread.

A man needs three conversions: first of the head, then of the heart, and finally of the pocketbook.

No person has ever walked our earth and been free from the pains of loneliness. Rich and poor, wise and ignorant, faith-filled and agnostic, healthy and unhealthy have all alike had to face and strugg...

Survival requires more than the basic biological necessities we readily acknowledge—oxygen, food, and water. It also demands something less tangible but equally vital: hope. When hope vanishes, the hu...

In this excerpt of a poem by William Wordsworth, the poet describes our yearning for life beyond this life. Our desire for something greater than ourselves: Whether we be young or old, Our desti...

Dangerous levels of exhaustion usually accumulate over a longer period of time in which we are consistently living beyond human limits, functioning outside our giftedness, or not paying attention to t...

Human flourishing is first and foremost a flourishing of relationships—our relationship with God and with others. But human flourishing is also a product of fruitful work that reflects our God who wor...

The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great. If men are deprived of the infinitely great they will not go on living a...

Man is pushed by drives. But he is pulled by values.

For prayer exists, no question about that. it is the peculiarly human response to the fact of this endless mystery of bliss and brutality, impersonal might and lyric intimacy that composes our experie...

With a graciousness and an understanding of human weakness that only God can exhibit, Jesus liberates us from alienation and self-condemnation and offers each of us a new possibility. He is the Savior...

Desire is primal: to be human is to want. Consider that wanting is the earliest language we learn. As infants, when we’re yet incapable of forming words on our tongue, we’re infinitely good at knowing...

The scholastics used to say: Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est —which means that to be properly human, you must go beyond the merely human.

In his poem Cocktail Party , T. S. Eliot captures a fundamental truth about human nature and the source of much hurt in the world. People’s actions are rarely driven by outright malice—intended t...

From a purely biological point of view man is not at home anywhere in the world.

Have you ever found yourself reading the Bible and you came across a scene that is horrific, filled with awful violence or scheming swindlers or ethical blunders, and you find yourself unsure what to ...

[Speaking of crucifixion] It seems almost inevitable to me that Jesus should go through this kind of darkness. . . . If you think of Jesus as God disguised as a man, then this will have no meaning for...

What is the matter with us is a question as old as time. Many philosophers and prophets believe they have an answer, but so too does holy scripture. According to the Dutch-Canadian philosopher Al Wolt...

Invitations are powerful. Like tides, they ebb and flow, shaping the contours of our existence. Some invitations we desperately want but never get—“Will you marry me?” or “Would you consider a promoti...

In the blockbuster 2017 Marvel movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 , the protagonist Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) meets his absentee father, Ego (Kurt Russell) who turns out to be an alien, a "Cel...

When Tara and I learned we were pregnant for the first time, we went right out and bought a crib. You might have done the same. The act of selecting, purchasing, and assembling a crib is deeply cathar...

Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

The South African politician Nic Diederichs—a prominent leader during the apartheid era—once made a rather provocative observation: God, he said, dislikes deadly uniformity. I hate to admit that I lik...

Even deliberately nonreligious people pray at times. Studies have shown that in secularized countries, prayer continues to be practiced not only by those who have no religious preference but even by m...

Every human being, each in their own way, has the same glory, and this glory is incomparably greater than the glory of any distinction they could struggle themselves into.