christianity

Oddly enough, many people struggle to learn how to pray because they are focusing on praying, not on God. Making prayer the center is like making conversation the center of a family mealtime. In prayer, focusing on the conversation is like trying to drive while looking at the windshield instead of through it. It freezes us, making us unsure of

In the Bible we find not only the greatest story ever told but the greatest possible story ever told.15 It features man’s tragedy, a divine comedy, and a fairy-tale ending.16 It’s an inviting story that points us, relentlessly, to the deep and abiding love of a God who creates, pursues, redeems, and restores all that he has made.

Such moments are more than “flashes of insight.” They are, as the apostle John explains, communion with God himself.7 In those moments the Spirit is making the gospel personal to you.

First, we need to acknowledge that the Bible really does speak to a certain universality of femininity and masculinity. There is a core there that does not change from age to age or culture to culture. If biblical manhood and womanhood are like two huge oak trees, we need to take note of the fixed roots and trunk.

Repentance, like faith, is an intellectual understanding (that sin is wrong), an emotional approval of the teachings of Scripture regarding sin (a sorrow for sin and a hatred of it), and a personal decision to turn from it (a renouncing of sin and a decision of the will to forsake it and lead a life of obedience to Christ instead).

By exegeting the people as well as the text, a preacher will discern applications that sink deep into individual experience rather than skip across the surface of life’s possibilities.

"The idea of the Fall is at bottom a proud idea, and through it man escapes from the sense of humiliation. If man fell away from God he must have been an exalted creature, endowed with great freedom and power." Only the exalted can be wretched; only the lofty can fall.

We have to stop and ask ourselves, Why does this warning, promise, command, or word matter?

When such redundancy occurs without apparent progression or distinction of thought, listeners feel they have just taken an unnecessary U-turn.