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You have only to “stay tuned,” and you can arrive at a perpetual state of confusion and, ultimately, despair with no effort at all.
What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound.
But now let us try out a subversive thought. Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.
“To be a Christian means to be like Jesus Christ.”
The sensed irrelevance of what God is doing to what makes up our lives is the foundational flaw in the existence of multitudes of professing Christians today.
Sins turn out to be astonishingly nonpartisan and unoriginal.
Does the gospel I preach and teach have a natural tendency to cause people who hear it to become full-time students of Jesus? Would those who believe it become his apprentices as a natural “next step”? What can we reasonably expect would result from people actually believing the substance of my message?
“Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting.
We who profess Christianity will believe what is constantly presented to us as gospel. If gospels of sin management are preached, they are what Christians will believe.
If you bury yourself in Psalms, you emerge knowing God and understanding life.
Perhaps people should be required to say, when they begin to interpret Jesus, whether they believe in his God or not. Then we would have a pretty good idea of what to expect.
Prayer is, above all, a means of forming character. It combines freedom and power with service and love.
