Christian spiritual formation rests on this indispensable foundation of death to self and cannot proceed except insofar as that foundation is being firmly laid and sustained.
G. K. Chesterton famously quipped, “There is only one unanswerable argument against Christianity: Christians.
The obviously well kept secret of the “ordinary” is that it is made to be a receptacle of the divine, a place where the life of God flows.
People are meant to live in an ongoing conversation with God, speaking and being spoken to.
So the call to “give an account” is, first, not a call to beat unwilling people into intellectual submission, but to be the servant of those in need, often indeed the servant of those who are in the grip of their own intellectual self-righteousness and pride, usually reinforced by their social surroundings.
Absurdity reigns, and confusion makes it look good.
Genuine transformation of the whole person into the goodness and power seen in Jesus and his “Abba” Father – the only transformation adequate to the human self – remains the necessary goal of human life.
With this magnificent God positioned among us, Jesus brings the assurance that our universe is a perfectly safe place for us to be. The.
Today we as a culture are schizophrenic on such matters. We want to say it doesn’t make any difference what we look at or hear. This, no doubt, is because we want to be “free” to show anything and to see anything – no matter how evil and revolting. But businesses still pay millions of dollars to show us something for thirty seconds on television. They do that because they know that what we repeatedly see and hear affects what we do. Otherwise they would go out of business.
Accordingly, the greatest need you and I have – the greatest need of collective humanity – is renovation of our heart. That spiritual place within us from which outlook, choices, and actions come has been formed by a world away from God. Now it must be transformed.
No, you don’t have to certain about anything you’re not certain about. In fact, certainty is not something you can choose, anyway. Certainty and uncertainty are not things that are under the will.
The older liberal theology, which indeed was still primarily a theology or a view of God, died and was resurrected in the form of a social ethic that one could share with people who had no reliance on a present God or a living Christ at all. Total inclusivism of all beliefs and practices except oppressive ones, such as the exclusivism of traditional Christianity itself, was the natural next step.
True Christlikeness, true companionship with Christ, comes at the point where it is hard not to respond as he would.
Whatever your situation, there is nothing more important on earth than to dwell in the knowledge of Christ and to bring that knowledge to others.
Spiritual disciplines are training exercises to give us power to live in the kingdom.
Love means will-to-good, willing the benefit of what or who is loved. We may say we love chocolate cake, but we don’t. Rather, we want to eat it. That is desire, not love. In our culture we have a great problem distinguishing between love and desire, but it is essential that we do so.
Witnessing is not thought of as bringing knowledge, but as attempts to convince people to do things. When you divorce faith from knowledge, you wind up in the position of trying to get people to do things, not of providing them with a basis on which they can then decide how to live and how to lead their lives together. Witnessing has turned into a kind of process of bothering people, and very few people witness because of that.
Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting.” This.
I realize that I will either allow my view of evil to determine my view of God and will cut him down accordingly, or I will allow my view of God to determine my view of the evil and will elevate him accordingly, accepting that nothing is beyond his power for good.
Worship is at once the overall character of the renovated thought life and the only safe place for a human being to stand.
Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith. They do not realize that in so doing they are not honoring God, but simply yielding to the deeply anti-intellectualist currents of Western egalitarianism, rooted, in turn, in the romantic idealization of impulse and blind feeling found in David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and their nineteenth- and twentieth-century followers.