When the things you cherish are taken away from you, you will grow in wisdom. You’ll learn more from losing things than you ever learned by gaining them. And what you’ll learn is that God is all you have to have, the one thing you can’t do without.
With too much tranquility, we tend to forget God. We need to get out of our ruts and go on some fearful adventures, the kind that require real faith. If we don’t, God may have to disturb us. He may have to say, “Get out of your country . . .”
What God has done is powerful, but neither nature nor the Scriptures are powerful enough to impress us if we are unobservant. For the significance of what we see and hear to sink in and alter our character and conduct, we have to pay attention.
If God’s love for us is active, then our response to Him must also be active. He will help us do whatever needs to be done (Philippians 4:13), but He won’t force salvation upon any person who doesn’t care enough to seek Him diligently.
When we are emphasizing the graciousness of God’s forgiveness, we may lead people to think that salvation has nothing to do with our conduct. But, in fact, it has very ...
If we don’t turn around, we’re going to spend eternity in a place where, without any hindrance from God, we’ll be completely “free to be ourselves.” And it will be ...
Becoming Christians, we are crucified with Christ, so to speak. As Paul describes it, the thing that is put to death is our “old self.” The “body of sin” is ...
In the widest sense, the words “people of God” apply to every person created by God. But in the Scriptures, the phrase often refers to a subset of the human ...
The Christian truly has “been brought from death to life” (Romans 6:13). And there is a wonderful irony in this. It was, after all, by dying that Jesus “abolished death ...
As long as we believe that we’re doing all right — and that any remaining problems are within the power of science and psychology to solve — we will cut ...
I know of no part of the plan of salvation that is any harder than this. It is gut-wrenching. But look at the doors that are opened. Humbled, we are ...
However unlikely, implausible, or even impossible it may seem, the gospel story must be judged on the basis of the evidence. So if our sense of likelihood tells us that ...
“All we want in Christ, we shall find in Christ. If we want little, we shall find little. If we want much, we shall find much; but if, in utter ...
It takes a person of uncommon honesty to say simply, “What is the truth? That’s what I want, period.” But that is the very essence of faith and humility, the ...
Given our tendency to drift away from Christ, our only hope is in our willingness to be warned. Christ loves us too much not to call us back to the ...
It is from the bondage of untruth that Jesus wants to liberate us (John 8:32), and if we don’t let Him set us free from the untruth in our own ...