It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good...

All the tales of miracles, with which the Old and New Testament are filled, are fit only for impostors to preach and fools to believe.

When our passion for the Great Commission, becomes our search for the Great Politician, we know we’re lost.

As we become more mature in faith, learning to trust that God is capable of all things, we will see God as bigger and bigger every time we encounter Him.

Worrying cannot change a thing, but faith can change everything.

If you are in a pit of stress or despair, don’t succumb to defeat. Don’t accept that difficult place as your fate. Even though God has allowed you to be there right now, he never intended for you to live there. Our God is bigger then whatever problem you are facing. The only way to...

While Islam is projected today as inimical and hostile to Christianity, Judaism and other Religions, the truth is that the Prophet was the great educator, teaching people the meaning and explanation of their own Religion, correcting and assisting them in following the right path, as taught by previous Prophets and messengers.

God did create a world without sin. We just screwed it up.

Before God does anything, before he makes anything for us to be sustained by, God says, “More than food, more than water, more than shelter, more than other people, they are going to need me.

more a loser than a victor” on the Path it is easy to lose sight of the fact that we are growing spiritually.

In the 300 years of the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these...

No egoism is so insufferable as the Christian with regard to his soul.

Both man and woman have their own parts to play in bringing faith to the next generation, and the woman’s role is particularly important. How can we ever think that the female sex is inferior when we see the essential responsibility God has given women in this world? Their sensitivity to spiritual concerns seems to...

Why is it so hard to get people to study the Scriptures? Common sense tells us what revelation commands: ‘Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God’–‘Search the Scriptures’–‘Be ready to give to every one a reason of the hope that is in you.’ These are the words of the inspired writers,...

It must be conceded by those who admit the authority of Scripture (such only he is addressing) that from the decision of the word of God there can be no appeal.

Servile, and base, and mercenary, is the notion of Christian practice among the bulk of nominal Christians. They give no more than they dare not with-hold; they abstain from nothing but what they must not practise.

It is the will of God that we live not only as rational beings, but as ‘new men’ regenerated by the Holy Spirit in Christ. It is His will that we reach out for our inheritance, that we answer His call to be His sons. We are born men without our consent, but the consent...

The Christian witness never benefits when Christian organizations are known more for what they are against than what they are for.

I believe that hospitality is central to the heart and ministry of Jesus and that to the extent we fail to extend this hospitality to gay people, the church will fail to walk in the way of Jesus.

For a brief moment I felt I was the older, the more mature.”A gift of life,” I responded, “if not to say, a gift of God, such as music, should not have the mocking charge of paradox leveled at it for things that are merely evidence of the fullness of its nature. One should love...

The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to the house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens...

God alone knows exactly what you and I must endure in order to form His character in us. It is in our trials that God refines us and removes our impurities. Like refined gold, when we pass through our trials, people will see His perfect reflection in us.

Fuck!” and that was no obscenity, but a most earnest prayerful utterance.In the final analysis, no matter what the vocabulary of prayer, or where muteness displaces words in prayer, the content—what is communicated by a person in the world before God—in prayer is in each and every circumstance the same and it can be put...

Hence the vocation of the Church of Christ in the world, in political conflict and social strife, is inherently eschatological. The Church is the embassy of the eschaton in the world. The church is the image of what the world is in its essential being. The Church is the trustee of the society which the...

Besides (said he) do you not observe what a keen Edge Christian Faith puts upon the ill-nature of Divines, when they are disputing about matters of Religion? ‘Tis common for Philosophers, Lawyers, Physicians, &c. to differ about matters which concern their Professions, and write one against another: But you will find some Temper and Decorum...

Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavours, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good...

A true god surely cannot have been born of a girl, nor died on the gibbet, nor be eaten in a piece of dough… [or inspired] books, filled with contradictions, madness, and horror.

My objection to Christianity is that it is infinitely cruel, infinitely selfish, and I might add infinitely absurd

If Jesus was put to death by powerful elites protecting their turf, then the murder is only a historical or academic puzzle. But if those who knew Him best—His longtime admirers—were involved, everything changes. It suddenly becomes personal, for we are then forced to confront the more troubling questions: Would I have sided with the...

I do not put much stock in “believing in God.” The grammar of “belief” invites a far too rationalistic account of what it means to be a Christian. “Belief” implies propositions about which you get to make up your mind before you know the work they are meant to do.

Perspective is as simple as answering this question: If I had 5 months to live would I experience this problem differently?

To be a follower of Christ and not just a fan means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

Good teaching gains its authority from having consistent and repeated support from multiple scriptural sources, and it builds a firm base for our unity and our confidence in Christ.

Remember, morality is God’s standard, not humankind’s standard. So it is important that we understand the process that God used to bring us his wisdom, truth and historical perspective.

If you’re stressing over happiness, you’re doing it wrong!

The source to low self-esteem is the lack of control you feel you have in your life. If you spend your life competing with others, trying to make right the wrongs done to you, or waste your time trying to look right, you will never achieve contentment and emotional balance. People you encounter in life...

I rather spend every Sunday of my life hanging off a cliff to rescue someone than spend one more time sitting in a pew next to hypocrites that talk about what they will do to better themselves and the world when they get around to it.

You will face your greatest opposition when you are closest to your biggest miracle.

I do not believe that God has given us this trial to not purpose. I know that the day will come when we will clearly understand why this persecution with all it’s sufferings has been bestowed upon us — for everything that Our Lord does is for our good. And yet, even as I write...

That new technologies and techniques would be forthcoming was a fundamental article of Christian faith. Hence, no bishops or theologians denounced clocks or sailing ships–although both were condemned on religious grounds in various non-Western societies.

[T]he more man accepts his limitations, the better is he enabled to know things truly.

I knew from catechism classes and other conversations that people who hadn’t grown up with a loving father sometimes struggled to understand a loving God.

Heaven is closer and more real than anything we experience in this life. And ultimately, I think that’s why I’ve seen these glimpses—I’m always on the lookout for them. I believe if you look closely, you can clearly experience them too.

Among the tastemakers and power brokers and intellectual agenda setters of late-twentieth-century America, orthodox Christianity was completely déclassé.

Christians must show that misery fits the good for heaven, while happiness prepares the bad for hell; that the wicked get all their good things in this life, and the good all their evil; that in this world God punishes the people he loves, and in the next, the ones he hates; that happiness makes...

Christians are God’s delivery people, through whom he does his giving to a needy world. We are conduits of God’s grace to others. Our eternal investment portfolio should be full of the most strategic kingdom-building projects to which we can disburse God’s funds.

A disciple does not ask, “How much can I keep?” but, “How much more can I give?” Whenever we start to get comfortable with our level of giving, it’s time to raise it again.

To turn the tide of materialism in the Christian community, we desperately need bold models of kingdom-centered living. Despite our need to do it in a way that doesn’t glorify people, we must hear each other’s stories about giving or else our people will not learn to give.

If economic catastrophe does come, will it be a time that draws Christians together to share every resource we have, or will it drive us apart to hide in our own basements or mountain retreats, guarding at gunpoint our private stores from others? If we faithfully use our assets for his kingdom now, rather than...

The fact that you don’t feel Him [God] holding you doesn’t change the fact that He still is.