Reflections on the loving kindness of the Triune God
Mark returns as a guest contributor this week. His probing questions call for open-hearted reflection. Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. If then your whole body is full of light, …
Read More Self-Revealing or Self-Deceiving?This post was first posted on the Cor Deo site. To visit the site please click here. What is spirituality? The question is huge—reaching well beyond a brief entry like this—but I would like to take a nibble. The main analogy for spirituality and spiritual growth in the Bible looks to organic or physical growth: …
Read More SpiritualityThis post is also found on the Cor Deo website. I invite you to visit the site by clicking here All of us are still growing. As adults we don’t pay as much attention to growth as we did as children. Back then our too-small shoes or too-short trousers were regular clues. But now as …
Read More GrowingIf a curious reader were to read the entire Bible in a month or so he’d notice that the faith expressed there seems oddly out of touch with the forms of faith common today. It’s as if some folks are editing the faith to help Jesus succeed. Let’s listen to such a possible meeting between …
Read More Helping JesusThis post is co-published with the Cor Deo website. I encourage you to go there by clicking here What happened to Demas? Demas is mentioned by Paul in both Colossians and Philemon. Along with Demas we find Aristarchus, Luke, and John Mark cited as a support team with Paul during the apostle’s house arrest in …
Read More DemasThis entry is also posted at the Cor Deo site: Cordeo.org.uk In a talk at Saturday’s Delighted by God conference I mentioned my dismay with the “spiritual disciplines”. Later someone asked about it. It’s worth talking about. In the Gospels—in Christ’s ministry—we just don’t find a promotion of the disciplines. By disciplines I mean a …
Read More Discipline & the DisciplinesYears ago John Stott’s book, Christ the Controversialist, caught my attention. He put into words what I was finding in my regular tours through the Bible: Jesus, though gracious and loving, always produced chaos as he rejected the status quo. He was, for instance, deeply spiritual yet without being either a Stoic or a mystic—both …
Read More Christ the ControversialistYesterday I was part of a small group of colleagues on a sightseeing trip in Goa, India. We visited the church where Francis Xavier, the founder of the Jesuits, is interred. Or, to be more accurate, displayed. His body is now partially visible in a windowed box on an elevated platform about fifteen meters beyond …
Read More ReligionSuccess in living a spiritual life depends, not surprisingly, on the Spirit. Yet the Christian tradition has been very soft in addressing the Spirit’s place in the Godhead and in our lives as believers. That despite many strong advocates for him both now and in the past. His role in both Old and New Testaments …
Read More What about the Spirit?Years ago, on my first day at Kibbutz Dovrat in Israel, I was walking across the lawn to find my newly assigned room. Off to my right a young boy—probably 4 or 5 years old—shouted to a man who was walking ahead of him, “Abba, Abba!” It was my first chance to hear a native …
Read More Triune Intimacy