No text can be understood out of its entire context. The most “entire” context is Jesus. Every biblical text must be read in the living presence of Jesus. Every word of the scriptural text is a window or door leading us out of the tarpaper shacks of self into this great outdoors of God’s revelation.
Every congregation is a congregation of sinners. As if that weren’t bad enough, they all have sinners for pastors.
An interest in souls divorced from an interest in Scripture leaves us without a text that shapes these souls. In the same way, an interest in Scripture divorced from an interest in souls leaves us without any material for the text to work on.
All serious and good writing anticipates precisely this kind of reading-ruminative and leisurely, a dalliance with words in contrast to wolfing down information.
Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes. A.
When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn’t go off and leave us- he enters into our trouble and saves us.
Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.
O God, when my faith gets overladen with dust, blow it clean with the wind of your Spirit. When my habits of obedience get stiff and rusty, anoint them with the oil of your Spirit. Restore the enthusiasm of my first love for you.
Waiting means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions.
Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God; it whets our appetite.
One way to define spiritual life is getting so tired and fed up with yourself you go on to something better, which is following Jesus.
The Bible makes it clear that every time that there is a story of faith, it is completely original. God’s creative genius is endless.
Wisdom is the art of living skillfully in whatever actual conditions we find ourselves.
All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.
My job is not to solve people’s problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.
It is easier to find guides, someone to tell you what to do, than someone to be with you in a discerning, prayerful companionship as you work it out yourself. This is what spiritual direction is.
Praying puts us at risk of getting involved in God’s conditions. Be slow to pray. Praying most often doesn’t get us what we want but what God wants, something quite at variance with what we conceive to be in our best interests.
When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.