in christ on Individualism

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...

Introduction Sometimes verses 1-4 are separated from 5-10 in preaching. N. T. Wright points out, however, that in both sections, the need for humility binds the passages together. A teacher must prac...

Introduction Our lectionary text is inextricably linked with the five verses that precede it. For that reason, I’ll give a summary of verses 1-4. It’s possible the lectionary authors chose to separat...

“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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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

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...

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.

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 ...

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....

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...

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...

My kids love the movie Remember the Titans . It’s the story of the integration of the TC WIlliams High School Football Team in Alexandria, Virginia, in the 1960s Civil Rights era. The white players a...

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...

Every person in Scripture lived out a personal story incarnated by an even greater story about God, life, and the world. That story came from the politics, theology, and culture ingrained in their mem...

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...

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.

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 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...

The twentieth-century writer A. W. Tozer made a stunning claim: “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” Really?  The most important thing?  M...

For every one look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ.

The suffering addressed in 1 Peter is not random misfortune but the social cost of a new identity that challenges prevailing cultural norms.

What each of us needs in place of the superficial virtue of niceness is a soul rooted and abiding in Christ. We need to be transformed so fully and completely that we actually are who we present ourse...

Nonetheless, this singular fact, full to the bursting, remains. It is a fact grounded in infinite outpouring: Christ is in me; I am in Christ. . . . Christ in me is not some narrow, introspective, dis...