When angels announced glad tidings of great joy, they sang a mystery: that the Word, the very message of God, had come in the flesh—Jesus! Elsewhere in Scripture, ‘glad tidings’ is more commonly translated as our familiar word, gospel. I fear the word has grown too familiar, and suffers from neglect. We must reclaim that the coming of God is the gospel,…
You may remember, but in 2013, a woman famously ruined Jesus. While she probably had good intentions, the 82-year-old Spanish pensioner named Cecilia Gimenez turned an oil fresco painted in the Misericordia Church in Borja, Spain, into an abomination described by the BBC as resembling a “crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey.” Her restoration of the 1910 depiction of Christ…
We simply can’t imagine a God who doesn’t think and act like us in relation to failure. Which is why we need a new mind. To be clear, when I say failure, I mean sin. How do we view ourselves when we fail again…and again…and again? How do we treat others when they fail? The fact is,…
The older I get, the more convinced I become that 1) God is good, and 2) we’re clueless. His goodness makes fools of us all because His good is so good, so simple and grand, as to defy belief. And that’s the problem, you see. We believers don’t believe. Oh, we say we do. The preacher will say, “We…
In New Testament Greek, the root word for grace is ‘joy.’ Isn’t that interesting? By inference, when our lives are full of grace—if we truly understand grace—then joy increasingly characterizes our personality and outlook. A domino effect begins, tempering our words and attitudes. We are less easily offended, more understanding, more patient. Joy extends inward with peace…
If you love Jesus in this life, you will eventually awaken to the truth that in a sense you exist outside your true place. We are all outside perfection. We dwell in the land of mess and rain, where bullies roam. Yes, grace is there with us, like a friend drawing us back toward warmth and shelter,…
This is not my own. It is a retelling of an old Oriental proverb. Yet the wisdom it contains is simple, memorable, and impacting. High in the Himalayan mountains lived a wise old man. Some said he was crazy. Periodically, he ventured down into the local village to entertain the villagers with his knowledge and…
