christianity

There are two reasons why this is a bad idea. First of all, Jesus never used guilt to motivate people. As a result, people in the New Testament never followed Jesus out of a sense of guilt. You’ll never find a verse that says, “And Peter looked upon the Lord and felt guilty and began to follow him.” The people who followed Jesus were motivated by w

The Discipline of silence is the voluntary and temporary abstention from speaking so that certain spiritual goals might be sought. Sometimes silence is observed in order to read the Bible, meditate on Scripture, pray, journal, and so on. Though there is no outward speaking, there may be intentional, biblical self-talk or prayer to God.

But the day came when I realized what real prayer meant, realized that prayer was having an audience with God, actually coming into the presence of God and asking for and getting things from Him. And the realization of that fact transformed my prayer life. Before that, prayer had been a mere duty, and sometimes a very irksome duty. But from that ti

The goal of the preacher is not to find novel ways of identifying Christ in every text (or naming Jesus in every sermon) but to show how each text manifests God’s grace in order to prepare and enable his people to embrace the hope provided by Christ.

By reading your Bible and its ‘stories’, you are becoming more spiritual because your brain is running first person simulations.

Believers who know and love God and yet do not experience His joy, power, or presence anywhere near the way God longs for them to know Him. If you’re tired of all the rules, all the formulas, all the religious activities, and even well-meaning church programs that promise transformation but don’t deliver, I invite you to join me on a journey of gra

Obedience is a wide place, an Edenic garden where rich blessings can grow in astonishing abundance—blessings like joy and peace and deep relationships with God and others that are filled with honest, faithful love that chokes out the thorns of pride and sin and selfishness. When our Father gives us commands, he is telling us how to remain in the ga

The frontline work of missions is the preaching of the Word of God, the gospel. If this public act is displaced by prayer, the supremacy of Christ in the mission of the church will be compromised.

Every wounded moment and its message comes with a “consent form” which I signed when I accepted the false message as if it were true. This “form,” the contract of my agreement, is what I can bring to God. I confess to him that I signed it, that I believed a lie. Then I repent, turn it in, and turn to him and ask him to heal my broken heart. This is