Sublime

I was humbled by her honesty and pained by her sadness as she mourned her own body and rhythms we’d come to cherish

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

There is nothing magic about any particular church tradition. Liturgy is never a silver bullet for sinfulness. These “formative practices” have no value outside of the gospel and God’s own initiative and power.6 But God has loved us and sought us—not only as individuals, but corporately as a people over millennia. As we learn the words, practices,

It’s not enough, Wagner says, to come once a week and hear of God’s goodness. We need to be involved in each other’s lives throughout the week.

Warren had experienced how even (or maybe particularly) in secular music there was a deep drive toward the pursuit of spirituality. The rock and folk music scenes manifested the clearest outward sign of the arrival of the nova effect (more on this below).

All of human life, our suffering and joy, our ordinary heartbreak and laughter, every moment of our lives, has meaning because our end is to discover ourselves to be in Christ, eternally beloved of God.

Christians have what theologians call a sacramental view of reality.2 We believe that the stuff of earth carries within it the sacred presence of God. When we find bliss, wonder, or glory, we brush up against a solid reality: God’s own truth, beauty, and goodness. We delight in these things because they participate in God.

Marge

Faith is allowing our lives to be bent toward the transcendent experience of divine action that comes to us in our negation, ministering new life to us. This is an experience of transcendence because it is a hypostatic experience (it is more than natural and material); it is the spiritual reality of finding ourselves in union with Christ.