life on The Christian Life

The Christian life is the life of Jesus Christ fleshed out in our lives—yours and mine—through the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Christian life is not a life dripping with personal satisfaction or one of basking in feeling “positive.” It isn’t a life baptized in stimulation or excitement. It definitely isn’t a life of conse...

The Christian life depends the single personality from the collective, not by isolating him but by giving him the status of an organ in the mystical body.

The Christian life that is joyless is a discredit to God and a disgrace to itself.

The Christian life is a great paradox. Those who die to self, find self. Those who die to their cravings will receive many times as much in this age, and, in the age to come, eternal life (Luke 18:29)...

The Christian life is not a constant high. I have my moments of deep discouragement. I have to go to God in prayer with tears in my eyes, and say, 'O God, forgive me,' or 'Help me.'

The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior.

What kind of life does the Christian story give rise to? This question is important, since the answer to it determines the shape of our spirituality.

The Christian experience, from start to finish, is a journey of faith.

The life of faith isn't meant for tourists. It's meant for pilgrims.

The key to Christian living is a thirst and hunger for God. And one of the main reasons people do not understand or experience the sovereignty of grace and the way it works through the awakening of so...

Too often people think about their “spiritual lives” as just one more aspect of their existence, alongside and largely separate from their “financial lives” or their “vocational lives.” Periodically t...

All of us share in what D. Elton Trueblood calls “the common ventures of life”—birth, marriage, work, death. Jesus, in his life and in his teaching, gave sacramental significance to these ordinary exp...

For over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living. . . . Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasin...

Christian leaders tend to use the Bible as their exclusive source for framing Christian speaking and living. Yet only through a kind of “thick description” of our present circumstances, being attentiv...

All my life I was taught how to die as a Christian, but no one ever taught me how I ought to live in the years before I die.

God’s utterance lovingly gives life; gives all life, all unfailing freshness; gives only life, and peace, and love, and beauty, harmony and joy. And the life God gives is nothing other, nothing less, ...

Jesus, the hero of the world’s most well-known spiritual narrative, offers us a mysteriously clear path to the good life: “Anyone who doesn’t pick up their cross and follow after me doesn’t deserve me...

Most of life is lived in the gaps between great moments. The peaks seem to protrude only after miles and miles of death valleys. While the Bible reveals its characters in terms of their high points, w...

Is life not full of opportunities for learning love? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. A...

Before you long for a life that is imperishable, you must accept that you are perishing along with everyone you care about. You must recognize that anything you might accomplish or acquire in this wor...

Some years back, on the Today Show, Maya Angelou was asked, with all that she had accomplished, could there be any more objectives, unfulfilled wishes, for her to pursue? Angelou said, “Oh, my, yes. I...

Pilgrim’s Progress smells of prison, for it was written in one. Thrown in jail for preaching the gospel without a license, Bunyan wrote a story in his cell. It is a story about life’s deepest question...

He who provides for this life but takes not care for eternity is wise for a moment but a fool forever.

The problem is that if we are regularly taught to understand the spiritual life as mainly, if not exclusively, about giving up things, we will never hear the call to engage with life or particular iss...

Christians don't simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all th...

We think knowledge of the Bible is all that matters, so we fail to attend to our character, our soul, and our relationships. Our way of living the Christian life leaves all of these things unchanged.

Cross-bearing is the long lesson of our mortal life. It is a part of God’s salvation, called sanctification. It is a lesson set before us every moment of every day.” “If life were an art lesson…we cou...

Ever since I became a Christian, I’ve met countless believers who treated their lives like the US government treats its various departments. In the US government, there is the Department of Education,...

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