There is a difference between a belief and a conviction. A belief can become something you merely hold; a conviction is that which holds you.
You see, when the skeptic asks why God did not fashion us so that we would only choose good, he or she completely misses – drastically misses – what goodness is in God’s eyes. Goodness is not an effect.
My experience at Trinity points up one big difference between Islam and Christianity: Islam shuns a critique of the Quran. If you ask the hard questions of the Quran, you risk being branded, and, in some cases, you even risk your life. The Christian, however, has always been willing to subject the Bible to the severest analysis and is able to come out, knowing that it can survive the blade of the skeptic.
What the person means by saying, “You must be open to everything” is really, “You must be open to everything that I am open to, and anything that I disagree with, you must disagree with too.” Indian.
Without the undergirding of love, the possessor of any conviction becomes obnoxious, and the dogma believed becomes repulsive to the one who disagrees with it.
Anytime evil becomes organized, its ferocity breathes the air of hell. There is nothing that can quench that fury. It cannot be stopped until it has accomplished its purpose. That is why hell is unending. Its nature is to burn on the inside, and no outward consolation or influence can change wickedness that is inflamed by numbers. The.
How do we build root systems capable of weathering every storm that seeks to draw us into the temporary and the profane?
Capturing the beauty of the conversion of the water into wine, the poet Alexander Pope said, “The conscious water saw its Master and blushed.
God clearly called me into the preaching and teaching ministry, principally in hostile arenas. An odd call for a shy individual, I would think! But God does it his way.
A society that hates laws that guard the soul despises not so much the laws as much as it despises the very thought of a soul. Those who belong to such a society consider the flesh the totality of their being.
Marriage is the harmony of God synchronizing two wills with the will of the Father.
If the loss of shame was the child of secularization, the loss of reason is the child of pluralization.
Unsuspecting people make a fatal mistake when they give their allegiance to a system of thought by focusing on its benefits while they ignore its systemic contradictions.
A knowledge and appreciation of history is difficult for a culture so enthralled by the moment, a culture that shuns the discipline of a larger context in any study. Unfortunately this loss of historical interest has made the present difficult to address because the context of the past is imperative if we are to salvage the future.
Our society is walking through a maze of cultural land mines and the heaviest price is exacted as we send our children on ahead.
At the end, Job discovered that this God who was his Creator and Designer, his Revealer and Comforter, his Mediator and Savior, was also his Strengthener and Restorer.
All religions are not the same. All religions do not point to God. All religions do not say that all religions are the same. At the heart of every religion is an uncompromising commitment to a particular way of defining who God is or is not and accordingly, of defining life’s purpose. Anyone who claims that all religions are the same betrays not only an ignorance of all religions but also a caricatured view of even the best-known ones. Every religion at its core is exclusive. But.
Herein lies the cardinal difference between the moralizing religions and Jesus’ offer to us: Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive.
Four words that are easy to grasp capture the medium of television: induction, seduction, deduction, and reduction. Take a good look at those four words, and it is easy to see how we have found ourselves playing mind games in a world of images, running counter to truth and redemption.
God’s grace is beyond description. He lifted all of us over the walls of our own imprisonment.
Marriage is not a commercial enterprise in which you replace a car you have tired of with another one. The truth is that the new car will lose its appeal, too, to say nothing about yourself.