I don’t know how many times my father said to my brother and me when we were children, “The Lord helps those who help themselves!” In the 40’s and 50’s culture that I grew up in it was a common theme which still survives today as an assumption in our culture, even though I don’t […]
As the church loses its prominent place in American society, as we lose membership in many churches, we Christians need to examine what we are doing that contributes to the loss of stature of the church and the religion itself. It is not enough to blame contemporary culture for our reduced status. We Christians have […]
I easily recognize God’s voice within after all these years because he never thinks like I do. For example, yesterday morning as I was awakening: these words on my mind—cerebellum the 2nd. If you’re interested in what this phrase meant to me see the ** section below. When he speaks in my mind, he is […]
The Narrow Gate I’ve been writing off and on lately about surrendering our lives to God. Today I am thinking about the “narrow gate,” which stands between belief in God and the experience of God. Jesus taught about the narrow gate: “small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only […]
I think our lives are like huge ocean liners that used to take two to three hours to make a significant turn(modern ones can do a 360 degree turn in 30 minutes). Slow, steady as she goes…that is the pace of our “repentance,” of turning our lives away from the culture towards the kingdom. Like […]
Think of the Holy Spirit as the tuner of our souls and personalities. Like a piano tuner tackles a piano that has long sat idled, the Holy Spirit takes our neglected souls and our existing personalities and attunes them so that they agree in pitch and harmonize well. He adjusts the “keys” and the “strings” […]
When we say, somewhat glibly, that God is love, what are we really saying? God loves us. Yes. But more than that, he loves us with an unconditional, unchanging outpouring of love and affection, support and invitation to be in a deep relationship with him, an invitation to step into the fullness of who we […]
Surrender is a loaded word. Give up. Give in. Yield. Capitulate. Submit. Acquiesce. Concede. These are a few of the synonyms for surrender. For an American person surrender often looks like quitting or giving up yourself. Waiving the white flag is not something we are taught. We fight. We take possession. We conquer. We don’t […]
There is a quote from Shakespeare that has always rung so true to me that for a long time I thought it came from the Bible: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, that thou canst not then be false to any man.”[1] Today I am writing […]