The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said.
And God has set up prayer in such a way that, if you want to explain it away, you can. That’s the human mind. God set it up like that for a reason, which is this: God ordained that people should be governed in the end by what they want.
My hope is to gain a fresh hearing for Jesus, especially among those who believe they already understand him. In his case, quite frankly, presumed familiarity has led to unfamiliarity, unfamiliarity has led to contempt, and contempt has led to profound ignorance.
The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low.
If our gospel does not free the individual up for a unique life of spiritual adventure in living with God daily, we simply have not entered fully into the good news that Jesus brought.
The true saint burns grace like a 747 burns fuel on takeoff.
If you don’t have a teacher you can’t have a disciple.
I believe that every human being is sufficiently depraved that when we get to heaven, no one will be able to say, I merited this.
In accord with his original intent, the heavenly Father has in fact prepared an individualized kingdom for every person, from the outset of creation.
Other kingdoms are still present on earth along with the kingdom of the heavens. That is the human condition.
The basic question ‘will I obey Christ ‘s teaching?’ is rarely taken as a serious issue. For example, to take one of Jesus’ commands, that is relevant to contemporary life, I don’t know of any church that actually teaches a church how to bless people who curse them, yet this is a clear command.
The union Christ had with the Father was the greatest that we can conceive of in this life-if indeed we can conceive of it.
Those who have been touched by forgiveness and new life and have thus entered into God’s rule become, like Jesus, bearers of that rule.
When Jesus directs us to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence.
When we receive God’s gift of life by relying on Christ, we find that God comes to act with us as we rely on him in our actions.
To depart from righteousness is to choose a life of crushing burdens, failures, and disappointments, a life caught in the toils of endless problems that are never resolved.
God inducts us into the eternal kind of life that flows through himself. He does this first by bringing that life to bear upon our needs, and then by diffusing it throughout our deeds – deeds done with expectation that he and his Father will act with and in our actions.
And the God who hears is also the one who speaks. He has spoken and is still speaking. Humanity remains his project, not its own, and his initiatives are always at work among us.
Knowing the ‘right answers’ does not mean we believe them. To believe them means to act as though they’re true.
Keep eternity before the children.