in christ on Autonomy

True freedom is not found by seeking to develop the powers of the self without limits, for the human person is not made for autonomy but for true relatedness in love and obedience; and this also entai...

“Christianity promises to make man free,” Anglican priest William R. Inge writes; “it never promises to make them independent.” Freedom and independence are polar opposites. The former leads to wellne...

Context of Galatians I still remember my intro to New Testament class in college and the professor discussing Paul’s letter to the Galatians. All of Paul’s other letters begin with words of adoration...

Preaching Commentary Context of Galatians I still remember my intro to New Testament class in college and the professor discussing Paul’s letter to the Galatians. All of Paul’s other letters begin ...

Freedom in Christ allows you to control the desires that once controlled you.

Submission is not subjugation. Subjugation turns a person into a thing, destroys individuality, and removes all liberty. Submission makes a person become more of what God wants him to be; it brings ou...

The purpose of the Disciplines is freedom. Our aim is the freedom, not the Discipline. The moment we make the Discipline our central focus, we will turn it into law and lose the corresponding freedom....

The goal of human freedom is not in freedom itself, nor it is in man, but in God. By giving man freedom, God has yielded to man a piece of His Divine authority, but with the intention that man himself...

The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a man's life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to...

God of freedom, whether we like to admit it or not, we do not treat everybody with equality. We silently judge others based on appearance, social status, and even race. Please give us the courage to m...

When every option is available to us, we don’t actually have freedom; we tend to shut down. I experienced what sociologists call choice overload (or paralysis) and decision fatigue. If you’ve ever tri...

The great mistake made by most of the Lord’s people is in hoping to discover in themselves that which is to be found in Christ alone.

Each one of us is called to live the truth of our unrepeatable uniqueness. We are not meant to model ourselves after others, however wonderful they may be. A delightful Jewish parable makes this point...

Being free means “being free for the other, because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free.

A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...

If you think of your identity and heart as an engine, you could say there is a kind of fuel that powers it cleanly and efficiently—and a kind of fuel that is not only polluting but also destroys the e...

I am created to do something or to be something for which no one else is created; I have a place in God’s counsels, in God’s world, which no one else has; . . . God knows me and calls me by my name.

Our selves are fashioned; we are adorned with histories that incline us to saunter, swagger, or shuffle. Given our histories, some of us move through the world with a cape; some of us don baggy sweate...

Its [Romans] message is not that ‘man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains’, as Rousseau put it at the beginning of The Social Contract (1762); it is rather that human beings are born in sin ...

Abiding is the continually renewed decision that what has been done once for all by the action of Jesus shall be the basis, the starting point, the context for all my thinking and deciding and doing.

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...

Preaching Commentary Inexpressible Things This chapter of Paul’s Corinthian correspondence is rich indeed, revealing so much about Paul and his relationship to the Corinthian church, a church which...

If you never left your home and avoided all interaction with other people, you couldn’t be characterized as a loving person. Instead, you might even be unloving because of your lack of concern for oth...

My identity does not begin when I begin to understand myself. There is something previous to what I think about myself, and it is what God thinks of me.

Dallas Willard gave a series of lectures on the kingdom of God. In one, he discussed the popularity of the phrase, “The truth will set you free” by putting it in its proper kingdom context: The whole...

Most Christians are more than content to live out their lives surrounded by the trappings of our world, rather than to risk losing them in becoming a radical Christian. A radical Christian (by my defi...

In my home country, the Netherlands, you still see many large wagon wheels, not on wagons, but as decorations at the entrances of farms or on the walls of restaurants. I have always been fascinated by...

Leader: Friends, Paul reminds us that we are "called to be saints.” But we know that our lives often do not reflect this high calling. We forget who we are. We forget whose we are. But the invit...

Parakalō There are a lot of interesting words in this passage, including the second one. In the NIV, it says, “I urge...” In English, “urge” has some range. If I “urge you to reconsider,” we all kno...

The way of Jesus cannot be imposed or mapped — it requires an active participation in following Jesus as he leads us through sometimes strange and unfamiliar territory, in circumstances that become cl...