Posts tagged as:

grace

The Saving Life of Christ

There is something which makes Christianity more than a religion, more than an ethic, and more than the idle dream of the sentimental idealist.  It is this something which makes it relevant to each one of us right now as a contemporary experience.  It is the fact that Christ Himself is the very life content [...]

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The Boundaries of God’s Grace: Toward a Larger Vision of Truth

In preparing to speak this Sunday on Luke 4:22-30, I’m struck by the ways Jesus (then and now) challenges our boundaries and blows open the scope of his grace.
The Quaker author and activist, Parker Palmer, writes in The Company of Strangers: Christians & the Renewal of America’s Public Life:
“At the heart of any authentic religious [...]

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Prayer for the Week: Suffering

Gracious God, all around me people are suffering. When I turn away from my own problems, I feel sorrow for the problems of others. Through the news, the media, and my conversations, I am daily confronted with the pain and suffering of so many innocent people in my life and in the world.
Suffering seems to [...]

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Prayer for the Week: Thanksgiving

Gracious God, these days of special remembrance can so easily pass without my being attentive to the reasons behind them. Open my eyes and heart to the many graces and blessings that blanket my life with joy. Help my soul awaken with the gratitude that will make me attentive and expectant for the [...]

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Baptism and Symbolism

In the life of a church, baptisms are wonderful snap-shots of God’s grace!  They’re all unique, and yet they all share certain things in common.  Here are my “Top 3″ symbols of baptism:

Washing.  A new follower of Jesus understands that he or she is cleansed.  We believe that Jesus Christ died in our place on [...]

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A New Way of Thinking About Spiritual Disciplines

There is a destructive cycle of spirituality where we begin with “doing,” or self-effort.  Then we link our sense of significance with our achievements.  I wrote about this in a post called, “Cycle of Grace.”  Here is one of the illustrations from that post:

We have a choice in our lives.  We can begin with work [...]

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Cycle of Grace

A common approach to life seems to be the cycle from “work” to “significance” to “success” to (the hope for) “acceptance.”  Something like this:

The key is that, for so many of us, the cycle begins in the “work” quadrant.  We feel the intense need to achieve in life.  Our identity is, all too often, based [...]

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Becoming Accident-Prone

Phillip Yancey, in his book, Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?, writes:
A rabbi taught that experiences of God can never be planned or achieved. “They are spontaneous moments of grace, almost accidental.” His student asked, “Rabbi, if God-realization is just accidental, why do we work so hard doing all these spiritual practices?” [...]

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