If God were impersonal, as the Eastern religions teach, then love – something that can happen only between two or more persons – would be an illusion. We can go further and say that even if God were only unipersonal, then love could not have appeared until after God began to create other beings. That would mean God was more fundamentally power than he was love. Love would not be as important as power.
The same sun that melts wax hardens clay.” In.
He argues that science cannot provide the means by which to judge whether its technological inventions are good or bad for human beings. To do that, we must know what a good human person is, and science cannot adjudicate morality or define such a thing.
The manger at Christmas means that, if you live like Jesus, there won’t be room for you in a lot of inns. In.
This pattern of the Cross means that the world’s glorification of power, might, and status is exposed and defeated. On the cross Christ wins through losing, triumphs through defeat, achieves power through weakness and service, comes to wealth via giving all away. Jesus Christ turns the values of the world upside down.
Modern culture, then, is the worst in history at preparing its members for the only inevitability – death. When this limited meaning horizon comes together with the advance of medicine, it leaves many people paralyzed with anxiety and fear when confronted with a dying person.
Jesus is not a metaphor. He is real. This all happened.
Jesus’s own answer to this question, through the parable, is similar. He is on the side of neither the irreligious nor the religious, but he singles out religious moralism as a particularly deadly spiritual condition.
There is a difference between believing that God is holy and gracious, and having a new sense on the heart of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. The difference between believing that God is gracious and tasting that God is gracious is as different as having a rational belief that honey is sweet and having the actual sense of its sweetness.”13.
The ego often hurts. That is because it has something incredibly wrong with it. Something unbelievably wrong with it. It is always drawing attention to itself – it does so every single day. It is always making us think about how we look and how we are treated. People sometimes say their feelings are hurt. But our feelings can’t be hurt! It is the ego that hurts – my sense of self, my identity. Our feelings are fine! It is my ego that hurts.
Why was God sending a deluge of disappointments? “Tis in this way,” the Lord replied, in essence: “I am ANSWERING your prayers for grace and faith. I am only trying to liberate you from the things that enslave you, drive you, and control you. Do you not see that if you loved me supremely, more than anything else, you’d be truly free? Find your all in me.
The living God, who revealed himself both at Mount Sinai and on the Cross, is the only Lord who, if you find him, can truly fulfill you, and, if you fail him, can truly forgive you.
Unless Jonah can see his own sin, and see himself as living wholly by the mercy of God, he will never understand how God can be merciful to evil people and still be just and faithful.
Whatever you live for actually owns you. You do not really control yourself. Whatever you live for and love the most controls you.
Sin always hardens the conscience, locks you in the prison of your own defensiveness and rationalizations, and eats you up slowly from the inside.
It is rearranging the raw material of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people in particular, thrive and flourish.
What must we do, then, to be saved? To find God we must repent of the things we have done wrong, but if that is all you do, you may remain just an elder brother. To truly become Christians we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right.
It is only when you see the desire to be your own Savior and Lord – lying beneath both your sins and your moral goodness – that you are on the verge of understanding the gospel and becoming a Christian indeed. When you realize that the antidote to being bad is not just being good, you are on the brink. If you follow through, it will change everything: how you relate to God, self, others, the world, your work, your sins, your virtue.
Without prayer that answers the God of the Bible, we will only be talking to ourselves.
Havel puts it well – humanity cannot save itself. In fact, he argues, the belief that we can save ourselves – that some political system or ideology can fix human problems – has only led to more darkness.