Sublime

If He remains a historical figure who came to pay for our sins, then we may put a cross around our neck, we may go to church on occasion to thank Him for what He did for us, but we may not look much different from the guy or gal next door. But if you become convinced that Jesus had other reasons for coming to earth—namely to teach humans how to be

We Christians are in the mess. This is vitally important. Not much good will happen when we move toward the mess if we don’t get this right. We don’t need to drive across town to find it. We don’t need to visit our unchurched neighbors across the street to encounter it. We need only look at our own hearts, our own families, our own lives. If we dec

As industrialization took hold, we needed pastors to check our secular excesses and to encourage us to live upright lives, particularly now that most of us were living in new urban centers, where temptation was ripe. We needed pastoral exhortation not to keep us from hell (as Edwards would believe) but to allow us to flourish, as an end in itself.