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July 19 - July 20, 2017
This word—conversion—is simply too tame and too refined to capture the train wreck that I experienced in coming face-to-face with the Living God.
risks are worth taking and that gain is only sweet when you actually have something to lose.
where everybody thinks the same nobody thinks very much.
“Jesus is the answer” seemed to me then and now like a tree without a root. Answers come after questions, not before.
A life outside of Christ is both hard and frightening; a life in Christ has hard edges and dark valleys, but it is purposeful even when painful.
Christians still scare me when they reduce Christianity to a lifestyle and claim that God is on the side of those who attend to the rules of the lifestyle they have invented or claim to find in the Bible.
when you make your mistakes in public you will learn that they are mistakes and in being corrected you will grow.
being wrong and responding to correction with resilience was a higher virtue than covering up your mistakes
without the proper response to failure, we don’t grow, we only age.
Too often the church does not know how to interface with university culture because it comes to the table only ready to moralize and not dialogue.
There is a core difference between sharing the gospel with the lost and imposing a specific moral standard on the unconverted.
I didn’t know which box to file this letter in,
This is how unbelievers should feel about the way we approach them!
repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin. How much greater? About the size of a mustard seed.
bridges get walked on and that is a normal part of being a bridge. Ah ha! And then I relaxed, remembering that this is the Lord’s work, not mine. Bridges, though, do get walked on, and if the Lord calls us to be a bridge, we have to learn to bear in his strength the weight. And it hurts. And it’s good. And the Lord equips.
If my life was the only evidence that Christ was alive, would anyone be convinced?
When you die to yourself, you have nothing from your past to use as clay out of which to shape your future.
real learning depends on our quest for real knowledge,
Knowledge depends on the renewal of our minds.
The only people who don’t belong in the classroom, library, laboratory, or lecturing from the podium are those who fear confrontation of incommensurable truth-claims, and who seek safety over the production and excavation of ideas—even scary ideas. If truth-claims, the scholarly evidence that supports them, and the opportunity to engage in meaningful and testy debate with those who think differently than you do are burning in your heart and mind, then you are in the right place and I have only one thing to say: welcome home.
Real learning, no matter how polished the moves or rehearsed the rhetoric, is empty learning unless we who profess are anchored in something bigger than we are.
Yes, I was still a traitor and an example of what not to be. But so too was Paul the Apostle shamed among the Pharisees, and I trusted that God would take my life and make a place for me.
This was my conversion in a nutshell: I lost everything but the dog.
The fact that God is sovereign over the good and the evil does not necessarily make the evil any less frightening.
Even when faced with the blinding sting of someone else’s sin, it really is not someone else’s sin that can hurt us. It is our own festering sin that takes the guise of innocence that will be the undoing of us all.
I know, I told my audience, why over 50% of Christian marriages end in divorce: because Christians act as though marriage redeems sin.
I don’t mind being offended if I grow in grace through the sock in the chops.
Jesus can equip anyone—no matter how lost or broken—for godly living. I’m living proof of that.
A happy family is not one where each member gets to do his or her own thing. A happy family fears God and strives for obedience.
“So, is it chic for white women to adopt black kids these days?” I took a deep breath and stood up to meet his gaze. “Are you a Christian?” I asked him. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “Did God save you because it was chic?”
How do we put Christ at the center? By intentionally holding all things captive to Christ, each moment of each day.
the idea that one is ever too busy to pray is delusion of the most dangerous variety.
I believe that there is no greater enemy to vital life-breathing faith than insisting on cultural sameness.
When fear rules your theology, God is nowhere to be found in your paradigm, no matter how many Bible verses you tack on to it.
Real fellowship requires stepping outside of you,
Anything worth doing will take time and cost you something.
do I love Jesus enough to face my children’s potential rejection of me?
have never known pregnancy. But I have seen God move mountains in the lives of children, and use my very hands and heart to re-parent hurt and broken children, and this is the most powerful mission in my world.
Mercy ministry always comes down to this: you can help, but only Jesus can heal.
