a place where the person you least want to live with always lives.” His definition applies equally to the group that gathers each Thanksgiving and the group that congregates each Sunday morning. (p. 64-65, Church:...

We’re in a celebrity culture, and when I turn on the news today I hear about Lindsay Lohan, Tiger Woods and Paris Hilton and the Kardashian sisters and ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ one thing after...

nested dolls” that break apart at the waist to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside…it occurred to me to me later that each of us, like the nested dolls, contains multiple selves, making us a...

Muslims have great reverence in their prayers but not much intimacy.

Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and predictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives.

Parents learn the uses of power and its limits. They can insist on certain outward behavior but cannot change inner attitudes. They can require obedience but not goodness – and certainly not love.

share power” with the likes of me, accomplishing his work through people, not despite them.

You are free to reject God. Make sure that you’re really rejecting God, not some caricature of God that the church has shown you. But I, one, respect a God who not only allows us...

Misunderstanding must be nakedly exposed before true understanding can begin to flourish.

Much of the misgiving that Muslims feel for the West stems from our strong emphasis on freedom, always a risky enterprise. I’ve heard some say they would rather rear their children in a closely guarded...

God formed an alliance based on the world as it is, full of flaws, whereas prayer calls God to account for the world as it should be.

God already knows the naked truth about us, of course. Why not acknowledge it?

As I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar...

In China, where you can be arrested and imprisoned for your faith, getting together with other Christians is a lifeline and you’ll risk anything for the privilege. No one attends church in China casually, or...

Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact...

I wrote a book on grace, and grace is a free gift, but to receive the gift you have to have your hands open. And a lot of people don’t have their hands open, there’s...

Followers of Jesus stake their claim on the firm belief that God will one day heal the planet of pain and death. Until that day arrives, the case against God must rely on incomplete evidence....

People instinctively know the difference between something done with a profit motive and something done with a love motive.

to suffer with” – and comfort and healings. God stands on the side of those who suffer. (pp.27-28/What Good Is God?)

The borderlanders are people who are kind of caught in the middle. They think there must be another world out there. There probably is a God, but they are either turned off by the church...

We are all trophies of God’s grace, some more dramatically than others; Jesus came for the sick and not the well, for the sinner and not the righteous. He came to redeem and transform, to...

When I write, I try to represent the ordinary person in the pew, which means that, ironically, I’m qualified to write about prayer by being unqualified!

Jesus gave us a model for the work of the church at the Last Supper. While his disciples kept proposing more organization ─ Hey, let’s elect officers, establish hierarchy, set standards of professionalism ─ Jesus...

I have come to know a God of compassion and mercy and love.

God reproduces and lives out His image in millions of ordinary people like us. It is a supreme mystery. We are called to bear that image as a Body because any one of us taken...

I think guilt is directional. You should get rid of it, but the way to get rid of it is not to get rid of the guilt feelings. It is to get rid of the...

We admit that we will never reach our ideal in this life, a distinctive the church claims that most other human institutions try to deny.

As a nonparent, I stand in awe of parents.

Homeless people bear God’s image too.

The world says you gain your life by getting more and more and more and more, but Jesus says, ‘No, that leads to death. You get it back by giving it away and when you...

The essence of Christian faith has come to us in story form, the story of a God who will go to any lengths to get his family back. The Bible tells of flawed people —...

When suffering happens, it forces us to confront life in a different way than we normally do.

Why the delay? Why does God let evil and pain so flagrantly exist, even thrive, on this planet?…He holds back for our sakes. Re-creation involves us; we are, in fact, at the center of his...

Yet as I read the birth stories about Jesus I cannot help but conclude that though the world may be tilted toward the rich and powerful, God is tilted toward the underdog.

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.

Most of the great books on prayer are written by ‘experts’ – monks, missionaries, mystics, saints. I’ve read scores of them, and mainly they make me feel guilty.

When I pray for another person, I am praying for God to open my eyes so that I can see that person as God does, and then enter into the stream of love that God...

It’s too bad prayer comes bundled in a package of ‘spiritual disciplines.’ Really, we should see prayer as a spiritual privilege. We don’t do it as a callisthenic exercise to gain points with God; we...

Philip Yancey sees our blasé attitude toward the faithfulness of God in the waitstaff At Yellowstone. Even when they are finished their chores, they don’t look up and marvel at the geiser going off. After...

And yet when I wish to explore how faith works, I usually sneak in by the back door of doubt, for I best learn about my own need for faith during its absence. God’s invisibility...

In no other arena is the church at greater risk of losing its calling than in the public square.

For me, prayer is not so much me setting out a shopping list of requests for God to consider as it is a way of ‘keeping company with God.’

If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer. Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn’t...

Most observers understand the difference between a committed Christian who accepts Jesus as a model for living and a ‘cultural Christian’ who happens to live in a nation with a Christian heritage. Most Muslims do...

If my activism, however well-motivated, drives out love, then I have misunderstood Jesus’ gospel. I am stuck with law, not the gospel of grace.

the promise of pleasures so alluring that we may devote our lives to their pursuit, and then the haunting realization that these pleasures ultimately do not satisfy.

A clear pattern soon emerged, as demonstrated by many polls: the more prominently Christians entered the political arena, the more negatively they were viewed by the rest of society.

People who think they are free eventually end up slaves to their own desires, and those who give their freedom away to the only One you can trust with that freedom eventually get it back.

As the books of Job, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk clearly show, God has a high threshold of tolerance for what appropriate to say in a prayer. God can “handle” my unsuppressed rage. I may well find...

In some ways, evil is backhanded proof of Gods existence.