Picture in your mind's eye an image of a great warrior, a renowned champion, returning home from far off lands. His fame has long preceded him, and now the reports of his feats are confirmed by the scars he bears, the...
Picture in your mind's eye an image of a great warrior, a renowned champion, returning home from far off lands. His fame has long preceded him, and now the reports of his feats are confirmed by the scars he bears, the...
God speaks to Israel through the prophet Isaiah when she is surrounded by enemies and making every effort to appease them through diplomacy, gifts, treaties, and bribes, and says this to her:
"You went to Molech with...
READ MOREYou probably know what you have been afraid to entrust to God. When we surrender our fear, we are offering it to Jesus. We are saying, “This fear is too much fear for me to bear. I give it to you because I believe you are good and worthy of my...
READ MOREJohn Spillane is a para-rescue jumper sent into the North Atlantic, into the worst storm of the twentieth century, the perfect storm, as the book and film called it, to rescue a fisherman lost at sea. When his helicopter goes down, he is...
READ MORE“Love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus taught (Mark 12:31), implying a direct link between one and the other. Loving our neighbor is clearly an essential to Christian faith; I think we all get that one. But the qualifier “as yourself” is lost...
READ MOREThe question lodged deep in our hearts, hidden from our conscious minds, is: "Do you care for me, God?"
What's under that question?
Blaise Pascal, in his Pensées, says, "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing...
READ MORELet’s come back to Zacchaeus and the town harlot who crashed the party to weep at Jesus’ feet. They were, both of them, very keenly aware of their failures. They knew they had fallen way short of God’s goodness. And not only did they know it, but...
READ MOREAnd then, alas, there is the church. Christianity, as it currently exists, has done some terrible things to men. When all is said and done, I think most men in the church believe that God put them on the earth to be a good boy. The problem with...
READ MOREAnd so Screwtape reveals the Enemy's ploy—first make humans flabby, with small passions and desires, then offer a sop to those diminished passions so that their experience is one of contentment. They know nothing of great...
I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God,
and I expelled you, O guardian cherub,
from among the fiery stones. (Ezekiel 28:16)
So evil entered the Story.
I am staggered by the level of naïveté that most...
READ MOREFor some reason we keep forgetting that Jesus, in the Gospels, is operating in enemy territory. We project into the Gospel stories a pastoral backdrop, the quaint charm of a Middle Eastern travel brochure—picturesque villages, bustling markets,...
READ MOREA young woman came to see me, as most seeking counseling do, because she was at the end of her rope. What had begun a year earlier as mild depression had sunk deeper and deeper until she found herself contemplating suicide. We met for many weeks...
READ MORE