The worldview of the Christian faith is simple enough. God has put enough into this world to make faith in him a most reasonable thing. But he has left enough out to make it impossible to live by sheer reason alone. The.
In its essence, faith is a confidence in the person of Jesus Christ and in His power, so that even when His power does not serve my end, my confidence in Him remains because of who He is. Faith for the Christian is the response of trust based on who Jesus Christ claimed to be, and it results in a life that brings both mind and heart in a commitment of love to Him.
Yet there is nothing so vulgar left in our present cultural experience for which some professor cannot be found somewhere to justify it. Reason has died.
Thankfully, our disappointments matter to God, and He has a way of taking even some of the bitterest moments we go through and making them into something of great significance in our life. It’s hard to understand it at the time. Not one of us wants that thread when it is being woven in. Not one of us says, ‘I can hardly wait to see where this is going to fit.’ We all say at that moment, ‘This is not the pattern I want.
Faith is a thing of the mind. If you do not believe that God is in control and has formed you for a purpose, then you will flounder on the high seas of purposelessness, drowning in the currents and drifting further into nothingness.
Think long and hard whether you have reached that mature stage of selflessness for this one you think you love so much. The love you enjoy will be the best thing that ever happened to you, but it will cost you your independence... The responsibility of marriage and family demands time, and when we cheat on that, we rob ourselves of the investment returns.
The resulting inability or even desire to reason and think through an idea logically is demonstrated by one-liners such as “I’m not into ’isms.
Are we really ever completely our own person or have we been conditioned in ways beyond our own imagination?
The end result is spirituality without dogma, religion without God, argument without substance, rationalization without rationality, and tranquillity by transfer of funds from the seeker’s bank account to the company that makes the best offer of nirvana, at the same time producing dogmatism about relativism in matters of ultimate meaning.
That is what a well-guarded prayer life can reveal about us, that our trust is not in ourselves but in seeking God’s strength for what we do. Prayer is not a substitute for action, but prayer undergirds action with the strength that makes the difference.
The Christian faith, simply stated, reminds us that our fundamental problem is not moral; it is spiritual.
If musicians and artists have no absolutes, they end up caring more about the way the thing is told than about the thing itself, and they slide deeper and deeper till it’s their means rather than the ends that matter.
In the postmodernist mentality the purpose of dialogue or debate is not for truth but only for feeling, and as passion has taken over, facts are given no legitimacy. The result is hate-filled shouting matches.
So I ask again – if a man who experiences such limited access to his own mental capacities can do such incredible work, how much more grand is the work of our Heavenly Father as he pulls together all the varied strands of life to reveal his grand design? Sometimes he uses soft and delicate colors; at other times he chooses dramatic and vibrant ones.
Accepting and celebrating the thread of your own personality is the first grasp of the Grand Weaver’s design in your life. You are not a number. He knows you by name.
In his play “Long Day’s Journey into Night, ” Eugene O’Neill has one of his characters utter a powerful statement toward the end of her life: “None of us can help the things life has done to us. They are done before you realize it and once they are done, they make you do other things, until at.
In our human imagination, we so often perceive our Heroes to be something larger than life. We exalt them in ways that do them a disservice... we convince ourselves that they are or were something essentially different than the rest of us.
I do not believe for a moment that the Scriptures are against wealth. But the warning to those who make wealth their pursuit is a stern reality. Wealth must be processed through a philosophy of life that is greater than wealth itself. If not, it shapes the mind for bitter disappointments.
The greater the involvement in another’s life, the greater is the demand for sacrifice.
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it – every, every moment?” The.