Jonathan Simcoe

I wasn’t quite sure what to feel. It wasn’t the timing I would have picked, but in all the darkness, there was new life. And life was a gift. And I was secretly excited, despite being entirely unsure how it would all work out.

Ravi Zacharias may have escaped justice in this world. But no one escapes justice in the next.

No one can know what transpired between Zacharias and God at his judgment, whether he understood what he’d done and repented of his sins and pleaded on the blood of Christ for forgiveness. But we do know God’s justice is being done, one way or another. And

It’s tempting to simply cite Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous maxim that the doctrine of original sin is “the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith,” note that every class of person is susceptible and vulnerable to sin, and move on. Celebrities are human, and we know that human beings are fallen, and thus there will always be

Too often I look for my desires to be met in God’s good gifts rather than in God himself. I don’t want to dismiss the wonderful things I have received from his hand, just as David is not minimizing the value of green pastures and quiet waters. Still, there is an infinite qualitative difference between the gifts and the Giver; between the green

But even as hope died in Sam, or seemed to die, it was turned to a new strength. Sam’s plain hobbit-face grew stern, almost grim, as the will hardened in him, and he felt through all his limbs a thrill, as if he was turning into some creature of stone and steel that neither despair nor weariness nor endless barren miles could subdue.

I owned a book in which there was a photograph of the Devils Thumb, a black-and-white image taken by an eminent glaciologist named Maynard Miller. In Miller’s aerial photo the mountain looked particularly sinister: a huge fin of exfoliated stone, dark and smeared with ice.

The gospel of King Jesus and of his kingdom-now is indeed “the power of God that brings salvation/deliverance.”

THERE IS A scandal here for our autonomous sense of entitlement: this new will, this graced freedom, is sheer gift. It can’t be earned or accomplished, which is an affront to our meritocratic sensibilities.