O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. Read more
I’m in Portland today speaking at the ReGeneration conference with my good friend Dan Kimball. Murray Watson’s helpful perspective on how major religions read their own “texts of terror”: In a column for Salon earlier this month, “Faith-fueled forces of hatred: Obama’s religion speech was troubling — but not for the reasons the right alleges,” Jeffrey Tayler suggested that the real problem with the religious extremism which increasingly confronts us lies deeper than merely the heinous actions we have witnessed.... Read more
The Zealot’s Way Some medications come in a gel capsule. The advantage is that the medicine inside is released into the body gradually. This is important if the medicine is very potent. “Time released capsules” is the mantra. Truth is very potent and sometimes quite hard to take. The gel capsule of truth is love. According to the Apostle Paul, “speaking the truth in love” helps us to grow, to mature as Christ-followers (cf. Ephesians 4:15). Under the guise of... Read more
Let us say you think Christians ought to progress in some ways toward a deeper spiritual maturity over time. Let us agree that in general we can gain a good glimpse of what maturity looks like. Let us then also agree that we can work toward developing a plan for each of us to become more spiritually mature– with emphasis on each and not just the group. This is the burden of Thomas E. Bergler, From Here to Maturity: Overcoming the Juvenilization of... Read more
The second essay in N. T. Wright’s book Surprised by Scripture addresses the question Do We Need a Historical Adam? Wright accepts a historical Adam and Eve as a representative pair chosen by God, much as God later chose Abraham and Israel. The need for a historical Adam is much the same as the need for a historical Israel. This is the way the story is told, and the way God worked in the world. (My interpretation, Wright never put... Read more
It is not uncommon to read someone poke the church but no one pokes the kingdom. (There’s a story in that observation that can’t be engaged in this post but I discuss how to compare the two in Kingdom Conspiracy.) More often than not people poke the church because they have an eye (or two) on the kingdom. Which is a way of saying they poke the church because they are strapped to utopia. Much kingdom thinking spins between utopia and... Read more
Amy Jacobs: For the past few weeks, [Andy] Stanley has been exhorting Christians to ditch their traditional “temple model” ways and go back to the one command Jesus prioritized — to love your neighbor as yourself. The “temple model,” as defined by Stanley, “grants extraordinary power to sacred men in sacred places who determine the meaning of sacred texts.” While the arrival of Jesus signaled the end of the temple model, the pastor said, Christians have continued to create versions... Read more
Like many of you I’ve had a dull ache in the pit of my stomach since last week’s video was released of ISIS beheading 21 Coptic Christians as a symbolic way of spreading terror. I’ve spent some time in Egypt with Coptic Christians before and wrote some last week about my experiences with them and how it’s colored the way I saw this tragedy. I don’t know about you, but in moments like this I feel great solidarity with Christians... Read more
As many of you know, my daughter, Laura, and I published a book together late last year — Sharing God’s Love: The Jesus Creed for Children. It is our hope that the children’s version of The Jesus Creed will assist parents, teachers, grandparents, aunts and uncles, as they guide children into loving God and loving others in practical ways, each day. Today we begin a weekly series on reflections of how the book has been used and applied. We hope you find it useful... Read more
Any discussion of Christian hope must look carefully at Scripture, both the Old Testament and the New Testament. The next section of John Polkinghorne’s book The God of Hope and the End of the World turns to Scripture beginning with the Old Testament and the views of life, death, hope, and the hereafter expressed in the Old Testament. Polkinghorne’s sketch is similar to Iain Provan’s as described last week (Old Testament Hope: For New Jerusalem – Not For Eden), but... Read more
Jesus Creed
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In